Title: Resource Management of Disruption Tolerant Networks
Author: Iyad Tumar
e-mail: i.tumar@jacobs-university.de
Partner: Jacobs University
Supervisor: Jürgen Schönwälder
Committee: Jürgen Schönwälder (Jacobs), Harald Haas (Jacobs), Rolf Stadler (KTH)
Year of start: 2007
Year of end: 2010
Funding institution: EMANICS

Disruption and delay tolerant networks (DTNs) are considered as an interesting and important research areas, and attract researchers’s attention last few years. They differ from traditional networks due to their special characteristics such as: frequent partitions, intermittent connectivity, and potentially long message delivery delay.

DTNs have many applications in remote and hazardous areas where the energy sources are constrained. These applications are assumed to operate over long period of time. Therefore, an efficient power management schemes are necessary to save energy and prolong the network life time. Based on DTNs characteristics and Since the network connectivity opportunities in such networks are rare, nodes are allowed to sleep by aggressively disabling their radios to save power.

The goal of this work is to develop a new power management scheme of disruption tolerant networks to save energy and extend the network life time. A big challenge is to balance between sleep periods and wake up periods to avoid missing opportunities communication between nodes.

The new power management approach combines an asynchronous approach, where nodes work on their own wake up schedules without synchronized clocks, with an on-demand scheme, where a low power radio (LPR) is used to search about contacts and a high power radio (HPR) undertakes the actual data transmission. By using this LPR, a significant amount of energy can be saved during searching mode.

[1] I.Tumar, J. Schönwälder: Resource Management of Disruption Tolerant Networks. 2nd Conference on Autonomous Infrastructure, Management and Security (AIMS 2008), Bremen, July 2008. Springer LNCS 5127.