A Hybrid Route Optimization Mechanism in Delay Tolerant Networks

Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) has ever remained an efficient communication technology in heterogeneous networks that need continuous connectivity among devices for desired service provisioning. The state-of-art routing protocols in DTNs are based on multipath store and forward approach using message replication for achieving high message delivery rate. However, these protocols significantly suffer from large communication overhead because of the lack of efficient techniques for controlling message replication. In this paper, an efficient hybrid route optimization technique in DTN is presented. The proposed technique implements a fitness function considering the distance and the trust parameters integrating Taylor series optimization with Harris Hawks-Jaya algorithm. In addition, the Reputation and Trust-based Context Aware Routing (RCAR) algorithm is implemented to find a secure path taking direct trust, indirect trust, historical trust, reputation, availability factors, and forwarding rate factor into account. The efficacy of the proposed protocol is analyzed using the performance metrics: delay, PDR, and throughput and the effectiveness is reported with comparative results with the state-of-art protocols. The proposed protocol significantly minimizes the routing overhead and improves the lifetime of devices thereby, increasing the overall performance of the network.