NER-DRP: Dissemination-based Routing Protocol with Network-layer Error Control for Intermittently Connected Mobile Networks

Reliable transmission in Intermittently Connected Mobile Networks (ICMNs) is a challenging work because the effective and reliable connection between the source and the destination can not be sustained. To reliably hand over data packets to the destination, many dissemination-based routing protocols are proposed. Dissemination-based routing protocols assure nodes including intermediate nodes and destinations have more chances to receive packets, which will increase the probability that the packets can be correctly received by the destination. However, the existing error recovery mechanisms in network layer use the simple CRC to check the data packets independently, and discard the error packets even if one correct packet can be obtained from more than one partly error packets. In this paper, first we propose a novel Network layer Error Recovery method (abbreviated as NER) based on Forward Error Correction (FEC). NER divides a data packet into Reed Solomon (RS) blocks and insert redundancy to each block. So the intermediate nodes and destinations can recover a correct data packet from multiple partially error copies of the same packet. Then we propose a novel routing protocol named NER-DRP based on the Epidemic routing and NER, which can improve the performance of ICMNs in terms of delivery ratio, end-to-end delay and count of hops.