Anycast, Multicast and Beyond: the Role of Manycast in DTN Communication
Samuel C. Nelson, Yih‐Chun Hu, Robin Hillary Kravets · Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) · 2011
With the recent proliferation of wireless communication de-vices, intermittent connectivity on the edge will quickly be-come a reality. These disruption tolerant networks, which are highly heterogeneous by nature, derive structure from node interaction and mobility. Despite this heterogeneity, the historical Internet-style design principle of point-to-point communication has dominated the DTN realm, severely hin-dering what could be a rich and diverse medium for new ap-plications. This paper supports the concept of group-based communication in DTNs by exploring the paradigm ofmany-cast routing, where the goal is to reach at least k members of a group of size m. This very general paradigm inherently includes other group-based routing concepts such as anycast and multicast. Our manycast exploration takes a three pronged approach. First, the relative difficulty of manycast requests is quantified via analysis, which greatly deepens our theoretical knowl-edge of how challenging the general paradigm is in a DTN environment. Second, to understand how different replication-based classes of DTN routing protocols respond to and han-dle manycast requests, extensive simulations are performed in multiple types of network environments. These results show that any DTN manycast protocol must dynamically react on a per-message basis by dynamically changing their routing approach to achieve maximum results. Third, using the conclusions drawn from the analysis and simula-tion results, we present a DTN manycast meta-protocol that selects the appropriate routing technique based on the cur-rent request and network conditions. 1.