  In this paper, we address the problem of efficient routing in delay tolerant
network. We propose a new routing protocol dubbed as ORION. In ORION, only a
single copy of a data packet is kept in the network and transmitted, contact by
contact, towards the destination. The aim of the ORION routing protocol is
twofold: on one hand, it enhances the delivery ratio in networks where an
end-to-end path does not necessarily exist, and on the other hand, it minimizes
the routing delay and the network overhead to achieve better performance. In
ORION, nodes are aware of their neighborhood by the mean of actual and
statistical estimation of new contacts. ORION makes use of autoregressive
moving average (ARMA) stochastic processes for best contact prediction and
geographical coordinates for optimal greedy data packet forwarding. Simulation
results have demonstrated that ORION outperforms other existing DTN routing
protocols such as PRoPHET in terms of end-to-end delay, packet delivery ratio,
hop count and first packet arrival.
