Need of Removing Delivered Message Replica from Delay Tolerant Network - A Problem Definition

Recent wireless networks observe number of deployments in various conditions where they come across different intensities of link disconnection. On the basis of extent of the operating circumstances these networks are termed as Intermittently Connected Networks (ICNs). The prevailing TCP/IP protocol cannot be operational in ICNs thus providing number of new stimulating problems that are appealing the focus of the researchers. The multi-copy routing schemes achieve higher delivery probability as compared to the single copy routing scheme. This improvement is achieved at the cost of higher resource utilization i.e. multi-copy routing protocols requires more buffer space, more bandwidth, incur more overheads and consume other vital network resources. Contribution of this work is the deletion of useless replicas of the messages which are already delivered to the intended destination. We evaluate our proposed method by simulation, on four major DTNs routing algorithms: Epidemic, Spray and Wait, ProPHET and MaxProp.