DTN Congestion Control Unplugged
Aloizio P. Silva, Scott C. Burleigh, Celso Massaki Hirata, Katia Obraczka · 2015
Unlike TCP/IP networks, in DTNs end-to-end paths between nodes cannot be guaranteed at all times. This means that DTN nodes may have to store messages for long periods of time before they can forward the messages towards their ultimate destinations. As a result, congestion control in DTNs is critical to achieve adequate performance, yet needs to be fundamentally different from congestion control in TCP/IP networks. This paper presents a comprehensive comparative performance study of DTN congestion control in a wide range of DTN scenarios. It complements our previous work~\cite{katia} in which we study the performance of DTN congestion control in interplanetary network scenarios. As in~\cite{katia}, our results confirm that although congestion control helps alleviate DTN congestion, existing mechanisms fall short from achieving adequate message delivery ratio and latency. Our study also confirms that congestion control in DTN scenarios should be independent of the underlying routing protocol, should employ a combination of reactive and proactive control as well as local information instead of relying on global knowledge.