Vehicle Delay-tolerant Network Routing Algorithm
based on Multi-period Bayesian Network
Hongyu Zhou∗† , Jiagao Wu∗† , Lu Shen∗† , Linfeng Liu
∗ School
of Computer, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing, Jiangsu 210023, China
† JiangsuKey Laboratory of Big Data Security & Intelligent Processing, Nanjing, Jiangsu 210023, China
Email: zhouhy1010@foxmail.com, jgwu@njupt.edu.cn, shenlu email@163.com, liulf@njupt.edu.cn
Abstract—Delay-tolerant networks (DTNs) are wireless mobile
networks where constant end-to-end connections may not exist
among nodes. In real-life vehicle DTNs, most nodes have repetitive
movement patterns. However, due to the change of time and
different activity scenarios, the movement patterns cannot be
described consistently with a single model. Considering this
issue, the Multi-period Bayesian Network (MBN) is proposed
to build multiple prediction models, which intends to predict
the regular movement patterns of nodes in the real world. The
Bayesian network model is constructed by using several network
parameters (e.g. spatial and temporal information at the time
of message forwarding) to describe the movement patterns of
DTN nodes. Additionally, a novel classification method called
Dynamic Multiple-Level Classification (DMLC), is proposed where
nodes are classified into multiple levels according to the dynamic
parameters. Followed by that, a routing algorithm based on MBN
is presented, which can make routing decisions based on the
classification results of DMLC. The simulation results show that
MBN algorithm and DMLC method can improve the delivery
ratio with a minor forwarding overhead.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Delay tolerant networks (DTNs) are wireless mobile net-
works, where constant end-to-end connections between source
nodes and destination nodes may not exist at any given time [1].
Due to intermittent contact and disconnections, the nodes adopt
the store-carry-and-forward mechanism to deliver messages.
Such networks have been applied in many fields such as the In-
terPlaNetary Internet, vehicular ad-hoc networks, opportunistic
mobile social networks and wireless sensor networks [2]–[4].
Vehicular Delay Tolerant Network (VDTN) is a new type
of DTNs based on the vehicular communications [5], where a
vehicle with a mobile router is used as a carrier to carry the
data from traffic sources to destinations. In earlier years, some
researchers who took the historical information of network
characteristics into consideration and proposed a number of
classic algorithms like PRoPHET [6] and Maxprop [7], etc.
In VDTNs, nodes usually have repetitive movement patterns.
For example, public transport buses follow the fixed routes and
schedules. Due to this reason, many routing algorithms based
on the methods of machine learning, such as Artificial Neural
Networks (ANN) [8], decision tree [9] and naive Bayesian
classifier [10], were proposed. In [8], Segundo et al. presented
an approach to predict the next node and the moment of
contact based on ANN. In [9] and [10], the authors applied
978-1-5386-6808-5/18/$31.00 ⃝2018
c IEEE
∗†
the decision tree and naive Bayesian classifier respectively to
divide nodes into different categories. However, ANN requires
a lot of data to be repeatedly trained, and both the decision tree
and the ANN are prone to the over-fit problem. The Bayesian
classifier is easy to be trained and suitable for incremental
learning. However, the naive Bayesian classifier is based on
the assumption of attribute independence. To be more precise, it
ignores the potential relationships among attributes. Moreover,
these algorithms failed to take into account the fact that there
are differences among the mobility patterns presented by nodes
at different periods of time. According to [11], we can obtain
that the metric of contacts per hour of nodes presents period-
ical fluctuations in real public transport network environment.
Considering these two problems, we propose a multi-period
Bayesian network routing algorithm where multiple Bayesian
network models of different periods are constructed from the
historical data. In addition, in order to capture the dynamic
characteristics of the network, we define delivery bonus as an
attribute of each node, which is updated dynamically according
to the time, encounter frequency and message delivery results.
The delivery bonus has a similar refresh mechanism with the
pheromone of ant colony algorithm [12], which is featured as
positive feedback and self-adapting optimization. Based on that,
nodes are classified into multiple levels which will be used as
the criteria for routing decisions.
The main contributions of this paper are as follows:
1) Multi-period Bayesian network is proposed to build sev-
eral prediction models, which intends to predict the node
regular movement patterns in the real world.
2) A new classification method called Dynamic Multiple-
Level Classification (DMLC), is proposed where nodes
are classified into different levels according to their
dynamic updating delivery bonus.
3) A multi-period Bayesian network routing algorithm is
presented, which can make routing decisions based on
the classification results obtained from MBN models. The
simulation results show that the combinational use of
MBN algorithm and DMLC outperforms other algorithms
by improving the delivery ratio with a minor forwarding
overhead.
 II. R ELATED W ORK
In order to overcome the mentioned challenges in DTNs,
several routing protocols have been proposed such as Epidemic
[13], FirstContact [14] and so on. In Epidemic, nodes forward
the copies of messages as many as possible, which maximizes
the delivery ratio and reduce the message delay. However,
massive network resources are wasted by delivering the redun-
dant copies of messages. In contrast, FirstContact is a single-
copy protocol where nodes only forward the message copies
to the first encounter node. Although reducing the excrescent
message copies and saving the buffer space, the single-copy
routing scheme limits the message success delivery. Besides,
researchers have proposed several routing protocols based on
prior probability. Lindgren et al. defined a transmission pre-
diction value according to the number of nodes encounter to
measure the probability of successful delivery in PRoPHET [6].
Burgess et al. calculated the shortest path of nodes movement
based on prior probabilities of encounter history information
between nodes in MaxProp [7]. However, those protocols
mentioned above only consider prior information about the
network characteristics. In this paper, we apply the posterior
probability model to the node classification which takes more
information into consideration. This means that when routing
decisions are made, the algorithm can select the next hop node
of the message copy more accurately [10].
A number of machine learning algorithms have been applied
to DTNs. In [8], Segundo et al. presented proposed an ANN
model to predict the next node and the moment of contact.
However, the initialized weights and threshold of ANN is diffi-
cult to determine, requiring repeated training to determine the
network structure and various parameters. In [9], Portugalpoma
et al. applied the decision tree to reducing network overhead by
discriminating the worst intermediate nodes. However, decision
tree is easy to cause over-fitting problems and can be unstable
because small variations in the data might result in a completely
different tree being generated. Bayesian classifier has stable
classification efficiency and is suitable for incremental learning.
Therefore it plays the important role in the area of machine
learning, which has been widely used in text classification and
weather forecasting and achieved good performance. Shabbir
Ahmed et al. in [10] introduced a naive Bayesian classifier to
DTNs and obtained good results. Naive Bayesian is based on
the assumption of attributes independence. However, it does
not take into account the dependency among attributes and
such dependency certainly exists in the real environment. For
instance, scheduled buses usually arrive at the same place at
the similar time according to their timetable. Jiao Jiao Liang
et al. in [15] applied the Bayesian network model to choose
an appropriate routing protocol based on different application
requirements. In spite of taking account of the dependencies
among the attributes, this method can only be applied in
selecting routing algorithms and does not take the data forward
strategy into consideration.
In this paper, we focus on the periodical and dynamic move-
ment patterns of nodes and use historic datasets to train the
multi-period Bayesian network models. Besides, we propose
the DMLC method to optimize the classification of nodes
through dynamic parameters. Combined with the Bayesian
network model, this method can improve the delivery ratio and
reduce the network overhead.
III. M ULTI - PERIOD BAYESIAN N ETWORK ROUTING
A LGORITHM
The Bayesian network can obtain an overall representation
of the joint probability distribution which combines both graph
and probability theories [16]. It uses the Directed Acyclic
Graph (DAG) and Conditional Probability Table (CPT), which
describes the dependencies among attributes of nodes and the
joint probability distributions of attributes, respectively. The
Bayesian network contains a set of variables, a set of probabil-
ities and a graphical structure that connects the variables with a
probability on each arc. In this paper, the Bayesian network is
applied to improve the routing decisions of nodes and therefore
overall network performance.
The rest of the section consists of two parts, we first
discuss the multi-period Bayesian network, and then the routing
algorithm is described in details.
A. Multi-period Bayesian network
In most VDTNs, the mobility patterns of the nodes generally
exhibit some level of time periodicity. Frans Ekman et al. [11]
presented a new movement model, called Working Day Move-
ment Model, which shows the patterns of people’s schedules
such as traveling by car or bus. In [11], the metric of contacts
per hour is used to measure the activity of nodes at the different
time in a day. This metric presents a regular distribution of one-
day cycle no matter the trace data is based on synthetic datasets
[11] or real trace datasets [17]. To be more specific, during the
rush hours in the morning and evening, the number of contacts
between nodes increased continuously, while in other periods,
it declined significantly. This means that a single model is
hard to describe the mobility patterns of the nodes for different
periods. Therefore, it is more reasonable to describe the patterns
of nodes by a multi-period model. Therefore, we propose the
Multi-period Bayesian Network (MBN) to capture the periodic
behavior of nodes in VDTNs. As shown in Fig. 1, the time
in a day is divided into n periods, and we construct multiple
models based on the datasets of these different periods. Due
to the fact that the MBN takes the multi-period characteristic
into consideration, the network performance can be further
improved.
B. Routing algorithm framework
As shown in Fig. 2, our routing algorithm framework in-
volves five phases: attribute selection, node classification, struc-
ture learning, inference and forwarding strategy. Then, these
phases will be discussed in detail in the following subsections.
 Period 1 Period 2 … Period n
Time
…
Fig. 1. The diagram of multi-period Bayesian network
1) Attribute selection: The state of a node can be described
by a number of attributes which are closely related to the
message delivery. The first step of applying the Bayesian
network to DTN is to select the appropriate attributes of nodes
and discrete their values. We select a set of attributes as
X =< x1 , x2 , x3 , x4 >, where
• x1 = Area Id < A1 , A2 , ..., Am1 >, signifying the location
of nodes at the time of forwarding the message. The entire
physical domain of the network is divided into m1 squares
of equal size.
• x2 = Time Slot < T1 , T2 , ..., Tm2 >, identifying the time
slot when the message copy is forwarded. The message
forwarding behavior changes with time since there are
different traffic patterns at different hours of a day. In our
scenario, the granularity of the time slots is chosen to be
30min. Therefore, 48 time slots are used to distinguish the
different periods.
• x3 = Average Inter-contact Interval < I1 , I2 , ..., Im3 >,
indicating the average interval of the encounter between
nodes. The interval is discretized by a certain number (e.g.
5s) and this attribute can reflect the current activity of the
node.
• x4 = Route Id < R1 , R2 , ..., Rm4 >, denoting the routes
of vehicle operating. It is a common situation that vehicles
follow the fixed commuter routes, e.g. bus routes. Different
vehicles may travel along the same route, so they may have
the same route id.
2) Classification: The Bayesian classifier can classify an
unknown sample based on its own attributes value and the
information of known samples. In [10], nodes are classified into
two categories based on their historic delivery results, which
are successful delivery and unsuccessful delivery. In this paper,
inspired by the idea of ant colony algorithm, we propose a new
classification method, Dynamic Multiple-Level Classification
(DMLC), which classify nodes into multiple levels according
to the dynamic updating parameter.
In ant colony algorithm, pheromone is a kind of chem-
icals that ants can smell. When walking, ants deposit
pheromone, which marks the passing route. The concentration
of pheromone decreases as time changes due to diffusion effects
[18]. Similarly, in our approach, Delivery Bonus φni ,nd (i)
is defined as a dynamic evolution criterion of node ni that
measures the ability to deliver messages to the destination node
nd at time slot Ti .
The delivery bonus has the similar updating mechanism with
Attribute Selection
Select the appropriate
node attributes
Classification
Classify the nodes
Structure Learning
Construct the Bayesian
network structures
Inference and Forwarding Strategy
Provide a theoretical basis
for routing decisions
Fig. 2. Routing algorithm framework
the pheromone of ant colony algorithm, which is featured as
positive feedback and self-adapting optimization. It has the
property of volatilization and is updated dynamically according
to time, encounter frequency and message delivery. The update
rule of φni ,nd (i) can be illustrated by Eq. (1).
∑v
φr
φni ,nd (i + 1) = (1 − ρ) φni ,nd (i) + c (i) ∆φc +
hk (i)
k=1
(1)
where ρ denotes the volatility coefficient and ρ ∈ [0, 1],
c(i) indicates the number of encountering with other nodes
at time slot Ti , v represents the number of messages that
are successfully delivered, hk (i) denotes the number of nodes
in each delivery path at time slot Ti and the initial delivery
bonus value of all nodes is the same, i.e. φni ,nd (0) = 100. The
detailed update rule is as follows: φni ,nd (i) decreases with time
slot in a ratio of ρ and increases by ∆φc if the node carrying
the message encounters another node. In addition, when the
message reaches the destination node at time slot Ti , a fixed
amount of delivery bonus (φr ) is allocated to the delivery path.
With hk (i) nodes on the path, the added delivery bonus for each
node is φr /hk (i).
In fact, in order to dynamically allocate φr in the absence
of an end-to-end path, the destination node will generate and
forward a small ACK message with the flooding mechanism
when they receive the message. The other nodes will update
their delivery bonus values according to the unique identifier
of the arrived messages after receiving the ACK message. If
the node that is not included in the delivery path, it will not be
updated.
For example, let ∆φc = 20, ρ = 0.2 and φr = 600. As
shown in Fig. 3(a), the delivery bonus of node n2 decreases by
20% at the end of time slot T1 . As shown in Fig. 3(b), node
n1 encounters node n2 and transmits the message to n2 at time
slot T2 , then the delivery bonus value of node n2 increases by
∆φc = 20. As shown in Fig. 3(c), the destination node n5 has

Time slot:T1 Time slot:T2
-20
+20
n2 n1 n2
r =0.2 jc =20
(a) (b)
Time slot:T3
+200 +200 +200
Ř
n1 n2 n3
+300
ř ∑
n4 n5
+300
jr =600
(c)
Fig. 3. The progress of generating delivery bonus
received two messages from node n1 at time slot T3 , where two
messages are delivered through the path 1: n1 → n2 → n3 →
n5 and path 2: n1 → n4 → n5 , respectively. Thus, the delivery
bonus of nodes n1 , n2 and n3 increase by φr /3 = 200, while
the values of nodes n1 and n4 will both increase by φr /2 = 300
when they receive the ACK messages.
From the above, it can be concluded that the more active the
node is, the larger the delivery bonus it can obtain. Likewise,
the shorter the path of the successfully delivered message is,
the more the delivery bonus the nodes can obtain.
In order to apply the delivery bonus into the classifier model,
we divide the value range of the delivery bonus into ml
intervals and each of them stands for a different level. Based
on this method, the nodes can be divided into <1, 2, 3, ..., ml >
levels. These levels are obtained based on the delivery bonus,
so we name them the Delivery Level (l). The higher the level
is, the greater the probability of the node succeeds in message
delivery is. Therefore, the dynamic delivery bonus is utilized
as the classification criteria in DMLC which can help nodes
make better routing decisions.
3) Structure learning: In general, there are two methods in
Bayesian network structure learning. The one is scoring search
learning method, which constructs the Bayesian network struc-
ture according to certain search strategies and scoring criteria.
The other is the learning algorithm based on dependency, where
statistical or information theories are used to quantitatively
analyze the dependencies between variables and obtain the best
network structure. Mutual information (MI) [19] is one type
of the second method mentioned above and in our approach,
it is applied to constructing Bayesian network structures. The
concept of mutual information is derived from the information
theory. It is considered as a measure of the statistical correlation
of two random variables, in which the greater the value of
mutual information is, the stronger the correlation between the
Period 1 Period 2 Period 3
(7am - 10am) (10am - 1pm) (1pm - 5pm) Time
L L L
x1 x2 x1 x2 x1 x2
x4 x4 x3 x4
x3 x3
Fig. 4. The Bayesian Network Structures of 3-period
variables is. The mutual information is defined as
p (xi , xj )
I(xi , xj ) = p (xi , xj ) log (2)
x ,x
p (xi ) p (xj )
i j
where p(xi ) and p(xj ) represent the probability density distri-
bution of attribute xi and attribute xj , and p(xi , xj ) represents
the joint probability density distribution of node attribute xi
and xj .
The mutual information can effectively describe the depen-
dencies among the node attributes. We perform statistics on the
datasets generated during the training phase and then determine
the dependencies among attributes according to Eq. (2). The
process of learning Bayesian network structure using MI is as
follows:
• Calculate the mutual information value of each pair of
attributes (xi , xj ) in the attributes set. If I(xi , xj ) is larger
than a threshold e1 , the edge < xi , xj > is added and e1
usually take a very small positive number. In this way, an
undirected graph is built up.
• Judge the direction of the side according to the mutual
information between the attributes and the class attributes.
When the dependency between xi and l is stronger than
that between xj and l, which is denoted as I(xi , l) >
I(xj , l), xi is more likely to be the parent attribute of xj .
Thus, we can get the direction of edge < xi , xj > which
is from xi to xj , otherwise from xj to xi .
Based on the above steps, we can obtain the Bayesian
network structures of various periods. In our scenario, as the
Fig. 4 shows, we focus on a 10-hour period from 7 am -
5 pm though we have mobility traces for the entire 24-hour
duration of a weekday. The 10-hour period is divided into 3
periods according to the metric of contacts per hour in which
the Bayesian network structure is constructed corresponding to
each period.
After obtaining the network structure, we can estimate the
conditional probability table of each attribute by counting the
corresponding data of the datasets.
4) Inference: A trained Bayesian network can be used
to estimate the value of a certain attribute(category) by the
observational values of the other attributes. In this paper, we
can calculate the probability of the sample belonging to a
certain level according to the Bayesian network model. Let
Xi = < x1i , x2i , ..., xsi > denote an instance of the current
attribute set. Utilizing Bayes theorem and Bayesian network the relay node. Moreover, if there are several encounter nodes,
classifier, the posterior probability P (lq |Xi ) can be calculated the current node will choose the one with the highest level as
from prior probability P (lq ) as the next hop node to deliver the message, and the relay node
continues to forward the message to the destination node or the
P (lq ) ∏
s
P (lq |Xi )= P (xji |πji ) (3) other relay node with a higher level and a greater probability.
P (Xi ) j=1 For example, suppose that node n1 encounters node n2 in the
where πji is the parent attributes of xji in the Bayesian network area of A1 . Node n1 carries a message of m4 whose destination
and s is the number of attributes. is node n3 . The current attributes set of node n1 is X1 = <
P (Xi ) is the probability of any node whose attribute set is A1 , T5 , I1 , R1 > and the attributes set of node n2 is X2 = <
Xi . For a given sample, the value of P (Xi ) is the same for all A1 , T5 , I2 , R3 >. Historic datasets of node n1 and node n2 are
class memberships. Thus, we can obtain stored in Table I and Table II respectively where M id records
the id of the forwarded message, Dest records the destination
∏
s
node of the message, x1 , x2 , x3 , x4 record the value of each
P (lq |Xi ) ∝ P (lq ) P (xji |πji ) (4)
attribute when the message is forwarded and Level is the node’s
j=1
classification result. Suppose the Bayesian network stucture of
Then, the level of node ni can be obtained according to Eq. current period is P eriod 1 in Fig. 4. According to Eqs. (6)-
(4) (8) and table II, we can obtain that the probability of node n1
  belonging to lq =1:
 ∏
s 
lni = arg max P (lq ) P (xji |πji ) (5)
lq ∈(1,...,ml )   Pn1 (lq = 1) = P (x1 = A1 |lq = 1)P (x2 = T5 |lq = 1)
j=1
P (x4 = R1 |x1 = A1 )P (x3 = I1 |x4 = R1 )
For example, suppose the Bayesian network stucture is
shown as P eriod 1 in Fig. 4. Then, we can get the delivery P (lq = 1)
level of node ni according to Fig. 4 and Eq. (5) 2 1 1 1
= × × × 0.01 ×
3 3 3 3
lni = arg max {P (lq ) P (x1 |lq )P (x2 |lq )
lq ∈(1,...,ml ) ≈ 2.47 × 10−4
(6)
P (x4 |x1 )P (x3 |x4 )}
Similarly, the probabilities of lq = 2, lq = 3 and lq = 4 are
Let Slq denote a sample set belonging to level lq in the respectively 3.3 × 10−9 , 10−10 and 10−10 . Thus the level of
historic datasets, Slq ,xji denote a sample set whose correspond- node n1 is ln1 = 1. In the same way, we can get that the level
ing attribute is equal to xji in Slq , and Slq ,xji ,πji denote a of node n2 is ln2 = 2, and the probability is 0.0165. Hence,
sample set whose corresponding parent attribute is equal to πji node n1 should forward the message to node n2 . Then, node
in Slq ,xji , then we can obtain n2 continues to forward the message to the destination node or
 
Slq ,xji  the other relay nodes.
P (lq ) =   (7) Actually, we can pre-calculate the distribution probability of
S lq
  all attributes in order to reduce the nodes’ requirements for
Slq ,xji ,πji  computing energy.
P (xji |πji ) =    (8)
Slq ,xji 
TABLE I. The dataset of node n1
where Slq , Slq ,xji and Slq ,xji ,πji can be obtained from histori-
cal data sets. It is noteworthy that if the size of any sample set Mid Dest
Area id Time slot Interval Route id Level
is zero, then the corresponding probability will also be zero, (x1 ) (x2 ) (x3 ) (x4 ) (l)
m1 n3 A3 T1 I1 R1 1
eliminating the effect of other attributes. In order to avoid this m2 n3 A2 T2 I1 R1 2
problem, we assume a low value (e.g. 0.01) for P (xji |πji ) m3 n3 A1 T5 I2 R3 1
whenever its value becomes zero. m4 n5 A3 T1 I3 R2 3
5) Forwarding strategy: The forwarding strategy consists
of two policies. The first one that when the node carrying
the message encounters the destination node, the message is TABLE II. The dataset of node n2
delivered to it.
The second policy involved is to classify the current and Area id Time slot Interval Route id Level
Mid Dest
(x1 ) (x2 ) (x3 ) (x4 ) (l)
the encounter nodes into corresponding levels. If the delivery m1 n3 A3 T1 I2 R3 2
level of the encountered node is larger than that of the current m2 n3 A2 T2 I1 R1 1
node, the message will be transmitted from the current node m3 n3 A1 T5 I2 R3 2
m4 n7 A3 T1 I3 R2 1
to the encountered node. If two levels are the same, the node
having the greater probability of current level will be chosen as
 IV. S IMULATION -BASED E VALUATIONS
A. Details of Mobility Traces
In this paper, we use the simulation software the ONE (The
Opportunistic Network Environment simulator) [20] to simu-
late the proposed algorithm. The data used in the simulation
experiment is derived from the real bus running track recorded
by Seattle Public Transportation System in the King County,
Seattle, USA. The data is obtained from CRAWDAD [21],
which contains a movement trajectory covering 5100 square
kilometers and involving 236 buses.
The whole area is divided into different small areas by the
size of 1km × 1km and then these areas are identified by
different area id. Theoretically, the smaller the partition is,
the better the simulation results are expected to be. However,
in practice, the amount of data to be processed will increase
largely in that way. Similarly, the time slot is divided by every
30 minutes and the average contact interval is discretized in 5
seconds. In order to simplify the model, the nodes are divided
into four levels at intervals of 200 in the delivery bonus.
B. Simulation Parameters
Although the original datasets provide complete 24-hour
mobile data, we focus on a 10 hour period from 7 am - 5 pm
in order to make the experimental environment closer to the
real environment. In addition, the data used in the simulation
experiment is narrowed down to an area of 38 km × 65 km,
which includes the central business district of this city. The
experiment involves a total of 34 nodes with enough trajectory
data and the data message with an interval of 100s and the size
of 1KB.
C. Gathering Historical Datasets
Before conducting this simulation experiment, we have to
first train the historical datasets. As a result, the data of 8 days
working days are selected. More specifically, one day’s data is
randomly selected as the test set and the rest data is used as the
training set. The historic datasets of each node is an empty table
by default. In the process of generating the historic datasets, the
nodes adopt the flooding mechanism to deliver the messages,
and every time the nodes encounter, the value of the message id,
the destination node, the current area id, time slot, route id and
average inter-contact interval will be recorded into the table.
After the experiment is finished, the node level is confirmed
according to the delivery bonus value and the datasets are also
stored locally.
D. Simulation results
In this section, MBN is evaluated by observing the per-
formance variations about different parameters and by com-
paring with other algorithms (naive Bayesian, Epidemic and
PRoPHET with single copy).
1) Impact of multi-period: According to the multi-period
characteristic of the nodes movement patterns, we construct the
1-period, 3-period (7am -10am, 10am - 1pm and 1pm - 5pm)
and 6-period (7am - 8:30am, 8:30am - 10am, 10am - 11:30am,
11:30am - 1pm, 1pm - 3:30pm and 3:30pm - 5pm) Bayesian
network models according to different hours of the day. Fig.
5 shows the performance of three types of Bayesian network
models in experiments. In Fig. 5(a), we can see that, compared
to the 1-period model, a larger delivery ratio can be achieved
by the 3-period model which is attributed to the fact that the
movement pattern reflected in 3-model is more suitable for the
node’s real mobile environment. However, too many periods
(e.g. 6-period model) lead to insufficient data for training each
model and are not conducive to learning the patterns from the
historical datasets.
Moreover, the overhead ratio of the 3-period model is sig-
nificantly lower than those of the 1-period model and 6-period
model as illustrated in Fig. 5(b). The reason is that the 3-period
model can make better routing decisions and reduce the waste
of resources in message forwarding. In Fig. 5(c), the delay of
the 1-period model is the highest because it uses the largest
datasets in the routing decision process.
2) Impact of delivery bonus volatility coefficient: In the
DMLC method, the delivery level of nodes is divided according
to the dynamic update delivery bonus in which the volatility
coefficient is ρ. In order to verify the effect of ρ, we compare
the MBN algorithms with different ρ in this experiment. In
Fig. 6(a), it can be observed that MBN with ρ = 0.25 has the
best performance in delivery ratio because the delivery bonus
is retained mostly and updated dynamically according to the
nodes state at the same time. When ρ is set as 0 and 0.5, we
can obtain the similar performance. However, when ρ is too big
(such as 0.75), the delivery bonus cannot be effectively reserved
after updating. As a result, the delivery ratio of MBN with ρ
= 0.75 decreases significantly. In Fig. 6(b), when ρ is 0.75, the
overhead ratio increases because only a small portion of the
delivery bonus is retained. In contrast, the other three perform
relatively better in network overhead. In Fig. 6(c), we can
obtain that MBN algorithm in these four cases exhibits similar
properties on account of the same routing decision process.
3) Comparisons of other algorithms: The results of com-
paring the delivery ratio, overhead ratio and average delay are
respectively illustrated in Fig. 7(a), Fig. 7(b) and Fig. 7(c).
Here, we adopt the 3-period model and ρ = 0.25 in MBN. The
results in Fig. 7(a) and Fig. 7(b) indicates that the overhead ratio
of Epidemic is the largest, although it maintains a pretty high
delivery ratio. The reason is that Epidemic adopts a flooding
mechanism to forward the data messages, and this mechanism
yields a larger delivery ratio, a shorter delivery delay and a
larger forwarding overhead. Note that the delivery ratio and
overhead ratio of MBN are better than those of PRoPHET
and Bayesian, since PRoPHET relies on prior probabilities
and cannot effectively utilize more network parameters and
Bayesian ignores the potential relationships among attributes.
 0.8 15 5500

MBN with 6−period 5000

0.7
MBN with 3−period 4500
MBN with 1−period
0.6 4000

Overhead Ratio(%)
10

Average Delay(s)
Delivery Ratio(%)

0.5 3500
3000
0.4
2500
0.3 2000
5
0.2 1500
MBN with 6−period MBN with 6−period
MBN with 3−period 1000 MBN with 3−period
0.1 MBN with 1−period
MBN with 1−period 500
0 0 0
0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5
Time(s) x 10
4 Time(s) x 10
4 Time(s) x 10
4

(a) Delivery Ratio (b) Overhead Ratio (c) Average Delay

Fig. 5. Impact of multi-period

0.8 15 5500

MBN with r=0.75 5000

0.7
MBN with r=0.5 4500
0.6 MBN with r=0.25
4000
MBN with r=0
Overhead Ratio(%)

10

Average Delay(s)
Delivery Ratio(%)

0.5 3500
3000
0.4
2500
0.3 2000
5 MBN with r=0.75
MBN with r=0.75
0.2 1500
MBN with r=0.5 MBN with r=0.5
MBN with r=0.25 1000 MBN with r=0.25
0.1 MBN with r=0 MBN with r=0
500
0 0 0
0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5
Time(s) x 10
4 Time(s) x 10
4 Time(s) x 10
4

(a) Delivery Ratio (b) Overhead Ratio (c) Average Delay

Fig. 6. Impact of delivery bonus volatility coefficient

1 30 5500

0.9 5000
25 4500
0.8
4000
0.7
Overhead Ratio(%)

20
Average Delay(s)
Delivery Ratio(%)

3500
0.6 Epidemic
MBN 3000
0.5 15 Bayesian
2500
PRoPHET
0.4
2000
10
0.3 Epidemic Epidemic
1500
0.2 MBN MBN
Bayesian 5 1000
Bayesian
0.1 PRoPHET 500 PRoPHET

0 0 0
0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5
Time(s) x 10
4 Time(s) x 10
4 Time(s) x 10
4

(a) Delivery Ratio (b) Overhead Ratio (c) Average Delay

Fig. 7. Algorithm Comparisons

Besides, the MBN considers the multi-period characteristic of V. C ONCLUSION

nodes movement patterns, which is able to reduce the waste of
This paper investigates the data forwarding problem for
resources in message forwarding. As it can be seen in Fig. 7(c),
VDTNs, where the delivery ratio is optimized while the over-
according to flooding mechanism of Epidemic, packets can be
head ratio is confined. The multi-period Bayesian network
easily forwarded. Therefore, the average delay of Epidemic can
classifier takes into account the dependencies among node
stay at a low level. However, the average delay of Prophet
attributes and captures the periodic movement patterns of
tends to be slightly higher. Likewise, the delay for the MBN
DTN nodes. Furthermore, the DMLC method is proposed to
algorithm also increased, since the forwarding strategy imposes
classify nodes into multiple levels which takes advantage of the
restrictions on the forwarding behavior of the next hop message.
dynamic delivery bonus. Based on those, MBN is developed to
In conclusion, MBN can improve the delivery ratio with a forward the data packets in the public transport environment.
minor overhead ratio through making routing decisions on the The simulations suggest that MBN can achieve a satisfactory
basis of the multi-period Bayesian network model and DMLC delivery ratio with a minor forwarding overhead. In the future,
method, and thus it is suitable for real situations in VDTNs. we are going to study our protocol under different mobility
models and extend it to multicast routing scenarios. [20] “The opportunistic network environment simulator,” [Online]. Available:
http://www.netlab.tkk.fi/tutkimus/dtn/theone/
ACKNOWLEDGMENT [21] J. G. Jetcheva, Y. C. Hu, S. P. Chaudhuri, A. K. Saha, and D. B. Johnson.
“Design and evaluation of a metropolitan area multitier wireless ad hoc
This research is supported by National Natural Science Foun- network architecture,” In Proceedings of fifth IEEE workshop on Mobile
Computing Systems and Applications, October 2003.
dation of China under Grants Nos. 41571389 and 61872191,
Open Research Fund from Key Laboratory of Computer Net-
work and Information Integration (SEU), Ministry of Edu-
cation, China, under Grant No. K93-9-2014-05B, Scientific
Research Foundation of NUPT under Grant No. NY214063.

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