A Fault Tolerance Scheme for Reliable Transfer in Delay Tolerant Networks

Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) is a class of networks that experience frequent and long-duration partitions due to sparse distribution of nodes. It has a broad prospect to new network applications for a better scalability, fault-tolerant, and high performance. In DTNs, path failure occurs frequently, so message transfer is not reliable. Sometimes it is required to change routing even in a very short period, resulting in transmission delay and reception delay. However, some well-known assumptions of traditional networks are no longer true in DTNs. In this paper, we study the problem of path failures in DTNs. The path failure process in DTNs is described when the path appears completely normal, completely failed and partially failed. Traditional approaches based on using precisely known network dynamics have not accounted for message losses. A new fault tolerant scheme to generate redundancy is to use erasure coding and full replication. This can greatly decrease the path failure rate. At last, a traffic DTN model is analyzed. Results reveal the superiority of our scheme in omparison to other present schemes.