• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• 제6권9호
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• pp.2202-2217
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• 2012

The transmission opportunities between nodes in Delay Tolerant Network (DTNs) are uncertain, and routing algorithms in DTNs often need nodes serving as relays for others to carry and forward messages. Due to selfishness, nodes may ask the source to pay a certain reward, and the reward may be varying with time. Moreover, the reward that the source obtains from the destination may also be varying with time. For example, the sooner the destination gets the message, the more rewards the source may obtain. The goal of this paper is to explore efficient ways for the source to maximize its total reward in such complex applications when it uses the probabilistic two-hop routing policy. We first propose a theoretical framework, which can be used to evaluate the total reward that the source can obtain. Then based on the model, we prove that the optimal forwarding policy confirms to the threshold form by the Pontryagin's Maximum Principle. Simulations based on both synthetic and real motion traces show the accuracy of our theoretical framework. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the performance of the optimal forwarding policy with threshold form is better through extensive numerical results, which conforms to the result obtained by the Maximum Principle.