Maximizing Routing Throughput with Applications to Delay Tolerant Networks

Many applications require efficient data routing and dissemination in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) in order to maximize the throughput of data in the network, such as providing healthcare to remote communities, and spreading related information in Mobile Social Networks (MSNs). In this thesis, the feasibility of using boats in the Amazon Delta Riverine region as data mule nodes is investigated and a robust data routing algorithm based on a fountain code approach is designed to ensure fast and timely data delivery considering unpredictable boat delays, break-downs, and high transmission failures. Then, the scenario of providing healthcare in Amazon Delta Region is extended to a general All-or-Nothing (Splittable) Multicommodity Flow (ANF) problem and a polynomial time constant approximation algorithm is designed for the maximum throughput routing problem based on a randomized rounding scheme with applications to DTNs. In an MSN, message content is closely related to users’ preferences, and can be used to significantly impact the performance of data dissemination. An interest- and content-based algorithm is developed where the contents of the messages, along with the network structural information are taken into consideration when making message relay decisions in order to maximize data throughput in an MSN. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of the above proposed data dissemination algorithm by comparing it with state-of-the-art techniques.