PASTOR-DTN: A Predictive, Adaptive, Social-Trust Optimized Routing Algorithm for Delay Tolerant Networks

Lakshmi Narayana Kondreddi*, S. Pallam Setty**
* Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, Kakinada, Andhra Pradesh, India.
** Department of Computer Science and Systems Engineering, Andhra University, Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, India.
Periodicity:July - September'2025

Abstract

Delay-tolerant networks (DTNs) must move data without stable end-to-end paths, forcing routers to trade delivery, delay, and resource use. We present PASTOR-DTN, a Predictive, Adaptive, Social-Trust Optimized routing algorithm that unifies five local signals—encounter-based predictability, per-peer trust, social centrality, buffer headroom (reward free space, penalize congestion), and TTL urgency—into a single utility used to choose the next hop under an explicit transmission budget. PASTOR couples this multi-factor utility with a token-bucket governor that bounds overhead during contact bursts and a short, hard first-hop window with a brief relay head start that deliberately converts many direct paths into efficient two-hop deliveries without copy explosion. Implemented in The ONE and evaluated against representative baselines under identical mobility, radio, traffic, TTL, and buffer settings, PASTOR traces a favorable delivery–overhead Pareto frontier. At a balanced operating point, it achieves 97.13% delivery with ≈2.01 overhead ratio, 695.5 s median latency, 1.88 average hop count, and 18.1 ks median buffer time—i.e., near the delivery and median delay of aggressive schemes at more than 10x lower overhead ratio in our evaluated setting, while outperforming copy-constrained baselines on buffer occupancy at comparable or lower latency. By integrating predictive, social-trust, congestion, and urgency cues under a strict budget and an explicit first-hop bias, PASTOR provides a practical, tunable controller for DTN routing that advances beyond single-signal or unbudgeted designs.

Keywords

Delay-Tolerant Networks, Opportunistic Routing, Token-Bucket Control, Selective Multi-Hop, Buffer Occupancy, Pareto Trade-Off.

How to Cite this Article?

Kondreddi, L. N., and Setty, S. P. (2025). PASTOR-DTN: A Predictive, Adaptive, Social-Trust Optimized Routing Algorithm for Delay Tolerant Networks. i-manager’s Journal on Information Technology, 14(3), 8-24.

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