Mobile Delay Tolerant Networks (MDTNs) are wireless mobile networks in which a complete routing path between two nodes that wish to communicate cannot be guaranteed. A number of networking scenarios have been categorized as MDTNs, such as vehicular ad hoc networks, pocket switched networks, etc. The network asynchrony, coupled with the limited resources of mobile devices make message dissemination (also called routing) one of the fundamental challenges in MDTNs. In the literature, a large body of work has been done to deal with routing in MDTNs. However, most of the existing routing protocols are based on at least one of the following three assumptions: (1) all messages can be routed by relying on a single mobility property; (2) all messages can be routed using a single message allocation strategy; (3) users are willing to disclose their mobility information and relationships to others in order to improve the quality of the routing. We argue that the above three assumptions are not realistic because: (1) users can exhibit various social behaviors and consequently various mobility properties (e.g., they can have regular movements during week-days and exhibit non-predictable movements during week-ends); (2) some messages might need more or less copies to be delivered according to the localization of the source and the destination and to the urgency of the message; and (3) users mobility data can disclose sensitive information about the users. In this thesis, we relieve MDTN routing from the above three restrictive assumptions. Firstly, we propose an adaptive routing protocol for mobile delay tolerant networks. The proposed protocol can dynamically learn the social properties of nodes based on their mobility patterns, and exploit the most appropriate routing strategy each time an intermediate node is encountered. Simulations performed on real mobility traces show that our protocol achieves a better delivery ratio than existing state-of-the-art routing protocols that rely on a single mobility property. Secondly, we present a delay and cost balancing protocol for efficient routing in mobile delay tolerant networks. The presented protocol reasons on the remaining time-to-live of a message to dynamically allocate the minimum number of copies that are necessary to achieve a given delivery probability. Evaluation results show that the protocol can achieve a good balance between message delivery delay and delivery cost, compared with most of the existing routing protocols in the literature. Lastly, we propose an efficient privacy preserving prediction-based routing protocol for mobile delay tolerant networks. This protocol preserves the mobility patterns of a node from being disclosed by exploiting the mobility pattern of communities that node belongs to. Evaluation results demonstrate that this protocol can obtain comparable routing performance to prediction-based protocols while preserving the mobility pattern of nodes.
