An Efficient Routing Protocol Using the History of Delivery Predictability in Opportunistic Networks

Abstract

In opportunistic networks such as delay tolerant network, a message is delivered to a final destination node using the opportunistic routing protocol since there is no guaranteed routing path from a sending node to a receiving node and most of the connections between nodes are temporary. In opportunistic routing, a message is delivered using a ‘store-carry-forward’ strategy, where a message is stored in the buffer of a node, a node carries the message while moving, and the message is forwarded to another node when a contact occurs. In this paper, we propose an efficient opportunistic routing protocol using the history of delivery predictability of mobile nodes. In the proposed routing protocol, if a node receives a message from another node, the value of the delivery predictability of the receiving node to the destination node for the message is managed, which is defined as the previous delivery predictability. Then, when two nodes contact, a message is forwarded only if the delivery predictability of the other node is higher than both the delivery predictability and previous delivery predictability of the sending node. Performance analysis results show that the proposed protocol performs best, in terms of delivery ratio, overhead ratio, and delivery latency for varying buffer size, message generation interval, and the number of nodes.

Keywords

• delivery predictability
• routing
• PRoPHET protocol
• delay tolerant networks
• opportunistic routing protocol