Routing and Buffer Management Based on Game Theory in Delay Tolerant Networks

Delay tolerant networks are a group of wireless networks that suffer long-term and frequent disconnections due to the scattered distribution of nodes and their movement. In these networks, which are a type of mobile networks, there may not be a connected path from the sender to the receiver, so message delivery is done by opportunistic routing based on the store, carry and Forward pattern. Routing is one of the main challenges in these networks. Routing consists of the steps of choosing a replay node, buffer management and data transmission. Various methods have been proposed to deal with the routing challenge. Most of these methods are only about replay node selection and few have discussed about buffer management and alternative packet selection. Considering that the problem of choosing an alternative package from the buffer is decision-making, it seems that using game theory can be effective in improving buffer management. In this paper, at each step of the routing process and when two nodes meet after determining the sender and receiver nodes, a method is presented that, based on game theory, decides with which packet from the receiving node's buffer if the buffer of the received packet is full, to be replaced. The simulation results of this method using THE ONE simulator show that buffer management with the proposed method increases the delivery ratio and reduces the average delay and overhead ratio .