Abstract:
The term delay-tolerant networking is invented to describe and encompass all types of long-delay,
disconnected, disrupted or intermittently-connected networks, where mobility and outages or
scheduled contacts may be experienced. Due to low telecommunication infrastructures coverage
in major parts of the country, intermittent connectivity and absence of end-to-end connectivity is
the potential problem for the health practitioners in underserved areas to exchange health
information among each other in common or with the specialists using communication links. As a
result, health practitioners in underserved areas serving the majority of the population are unable
to exchange health information in communal and also isolated from specialist support this in turn
hampering the health care centers from providing better health care services. The main objective
of this study is to bridge the health information exchange gaps among health practitioners in
underserved areas using delay-tolerant network mechanisms based on the proposed framework.
As health care centers (hospitals) are located sparsely, using flooding-based routing algorithm is
the best option in order to achieve high message delivery probability. But the flooding-based
routing scheme incurs buffer overflows as a nodes buffer size is limited in reality. Thus, the
researcher proposed a buffer management approach named Epidemic Routing based on Message
Replication Rate Priority (ERMRRP) to manage the limited buffer space of nodes. For the
simulation Opportunistic Network Environment (ONE) Simulator is used. The existing routing
algorithm and the proposed routing algorithm approach has been evaluated. They were analyzed
on three different metrics namely delivery probability, average latency and overhead ratio. The
simulation results obtained in this thesis show that for the proposed routing approach, the
message delivery probability is very high, minimum overhead and high average latency (as a
tradeoff due to computation at buffer checker in preparing room and priority for transmission)
when the nodes buffer get constrained. However, when there is sufficient buffer space, both
epidemic and proposed routing approach shows comparable performance in terms of delivery
probability and Average latency
