Suppressive Fair Buffer Management Policy for Intermittently Connected Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

We propose a suppressive fair buffer management policy for intermittently connected mobile ad-hoc networks. So far, several buffer management policies have been considered. These existing buffer management policies assume that all stored messages can be replaced when nodes encounter each other. Buffer management policies, however, can prioritize messages stored at the receiving side over those at the sending side. By doing this, message transmissions are suppressive, and thus energy consumption in terms of sending messages is reduced. Moreover, our proposed policy gives relay messages with a small number of message copies to high priority. Specifically, our proposed policy maintains a sharing of buffer spaces that is as fair as possible. In this paper, we reveal how the suppression of receiving messages affects the system performance compared with existing buffer management policies. Through simulation experiments, we show that the suppressive fair buffer management policy improves energy consumption without largely degrading the delivery failure probability and the mean delivery delay.