A game theoretic context-based routing protocol for opportunistic networks in an IoT scenario

In the next generation Internet, it is expected that human, smart devices, and “things” will be able to communicate and interact with each other opportunistically in order to share their data. An analysis of this type of relationship is made possible due to the advent of the Opportunistic Internet of Things (OppIoT), a new paradigm that enable information sharing and dissemination among opportunistic communities formed based on human mobility and opportunistic contacts. Designing data dissemination and routing protocols for opportunistic IoT is a challenge since contacts between nodes and users’ social behaviors are to be tighten together as design constraints. Nonetheless, as opportunistic networking rely on spontaneous connectivity between the users and wireless devices, it can be argued that OppIoT is a form of opportunistic social networks (OppNets) extension, with focus on the relationship between human and opportunistic connection of smart things. As such, some routing protocols that have been designed to work for infrastructureless OppNets can also be applied in OppIoT systems. In this context, the History Based Routing Protocol for Opportunistic Networks (HiBOp) is an appealing choice. In this paper, an acknowledgement (ACK) forwarding mechanism to boost the performance of HiBOp is proposed based on the concept of centrality. Simulation results are provided, showing that HiBOp with centrality outperforms HiBOp in terms of predefined performance metrics.

Opportunistic networks (OppNets) provide an infrastructure-less environment for delivering messages from source to destination. However, random nature of network topologies, unstable node connections and many other factors make routing of messages difficult. Transfer of a message from source to destination depends on the opportunity available to the carrier node for its encounter with the destination. Hence, an intelligent store-carry-forward paradigm needs to be defined which judicially transfers the message from source to the intermediate node till it reaches its destination. In this paper, a new routing protocol called Cognitive Routing Protocol for Opportunistic networks (CRPO) is proposed which makes intelligent decisions based on its past experiences and sensory inputs. It defines a neural network at each node and learns about the simulating environment with time for the successful delivery of messages. From simulation results, the authors observed that the proposed routing protocol outperforms traditional routing protocols such as Epidemic and PRoPHET, and an advanced routing protocol HBPR in terms of message delivery ratio, overhead ratio and number of messages getting dropped.

Opportunistic networks are a kind of Ad Hoc networks that make use of meeting opportunities from mobile nodes to realize the network communication which doesn't need a full path between the source nodes and destination nodes. It’s tolerant in latency and network division. It’s a great challenge to design routing protocols in opportunistic networks in that the movements of nodes are uncertain leading to intermittent connection which make it hard to transmit message to its destination. However, the problems have also attracted more and more attention from researchers. Firstly, in this paper, we introduced the basic concept of opportunistic networks. Secondly we classified and interpreted routing protocols according to the infrastructure, scenario, forwarding mechanism etc. Thirdly, we carried out the computer simulation and analysis for opportunistic network routing protocols in aspect of message delivery ratio, network latency, routing overhead and the number of lost packets. Then we summarized the advantages and disadvantages of routing protocol and discussed its applicability. Finally we looked ahead the hotspot of recent routing protocols under opportunistic networks.

An Opportunistic Network is an intermittently connected Mobile Ad-hoc Networks that exploits the communication opportunity between the nodes for data transmission whenever they are within the communication range of each other even for a short time. In contrast to the Mobile Ad-hoc Networks, Opportunistic Networks follow store-carry-forward approach for the data transmission. Routing in this type of network depends on many factors, like the direction of the node's movement, the supported interface bandwidth (Bluetooth, high-speed Internet, etc.), the node's speed, and the node's buffer size. In this research work, a context-aware routing protocol is proposed that uses the frequency of contacts among nodes as context information. The frequency of meetings between any two nodes is found to be a good heuristic to identify the message's best forwarder. The proposed routing protocol is simulated on opportunistic network environment (ONE) simulator and the results are compared with the most prominent routing protocols of context-oblivious and context-aware classes, and it was found that the proposed routing protocol performs better than other protocols in terms of delivery probability and buffer average time.

Intermittently connected opportunistic networks experience frequent disconnections and shorter contact durations. Therefore routing of messages towards their destinations needs to be handled from various points of view. Predictability and connectedness are two information which can be determined by participating mobile nodes of an opportunistic content distribution network using their past contacts. Epidemic or probabilistic routing protocols do not fully utilize these information to route messages towards their destinations. In this paper we describe the routing algorithm, implementation details, experiment design and the performance validation of a new, adaptive routing protocol which utilizes the predictability and connectedness information to route messages efficiently. Simulation based comparative studies show that the proposed routing protocol outperforms existing Epidemic and probabilistic routing protocols in delivering messages.

In opportunistic networks(oppnets),because of low density,nodal mobility,and limited transmission range,network topology will disrupt and nodes will detach from the networks.Thus,an end-to-end path from source to destination may not exist,which is a challenge for the design of routing protocols.This issue has attracted more and more attention recently.Firstly,the concept,architecture,and characteristics of opportunistic networks were introduced.Then,the progress and the new mechanisms of routing protocols for opportunistic networks were described.The present routing protocols were also classified,introduced,and compared.Finally,the future directions were given,which aimed to benefit the future research and applications of opportunistic networks.

The Internet of Things (IoT) enhances the succeeding generation of web facilities by supporting pleasant relations among people and linked devices. A common way to connect IoT devices is to create an environment based on global infrastructure to create connections between objects, tasks, people, sensors, places, and machinery. Suitable organization of IoT-based structures in smart cities as well as societies based on channeling, treating, processing, sensing data, and faster communication systems for IoT devices. The crucial need for universal access and real-time performance induces the expedition for a network-based IoT substructure. Opportunistic networks and IoT are originally distributed computing standards. Aside from the circumstance that IoT and opportunistic networks are unrelated and measured separate independent communication sites, furthermore the paper proposes a novel opportunistic-IoT network (opportunistic network based on IoT’s qualities). In addition, it is stated that how we can create a well-defined opportunistic network through discovering essential connections among individuals and smart devices is one key issue between opportunistic societies. Because of these realities, the paper analyses a few basic applications, forthcoming challenges in the formation of opportunistic networks based on the IoT background, and the organization of opportunistic network’s forwarding procedures. The paper also implements, links, and evaluates the functionality of three forwarding protocols named PRoPHET, MaxProp, and Epidemic with a realistic city model by using THE ONE simulator.

Opportunistic networks are a new evolution of mobile ad hoc networks composed of intermittently connected nodes, in which the routing for the dynamic topology is a challenging issue. In opportunistic networks, the mobile nodes with common interest or close relationship may form into groups and move together, which brings us a good feature to employ when designing the routing protocol for opportunistic networks under resource constraints. Our main idea in this paper is to maximize the message delivery probability in a group-aware opportunistic network under the constraints of bandwidth and buffer space. Embedded this idea, we propose a cooperative routing protocol using the group feature, which includes the cooperative message transfer scheme and the buffer management strategy. In the cooperative message transfer scheme, the limited bandwidth is considered and the message transfer priorities are designed to maximize the delivery probability. In the buffer management strategy, by considering the constraint of buffer space, we propose the cooperative message caching scheme and the dropping order of the messages is designed to minimize the reduced delivery probability. Finally, we conduct the simulations to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed routing protocol.

Opportunistic Networks (OppNets) is gaining popularity day-by-day due to their various applications in the real-life world. The two major reasons for its popularity are its suitability to be established without any requirement of additional infrastructure and the ability to tolerate long delays during data communication. Opportunistic Network is also considered as a descendant of Mobile Ad hoc Networks (Manets) and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), therefore, it inherits most of the traits from both mentioned networking techniques. Apart from its popularity, Opportunistic Networks are also starting to face challenges nowadays to comply with the emerging issues of the large size of data to be communicated and blind forwarding of data among participating nodes in the network. These issues lower the overall performance of the network. Keeping this thing in mind, ML-Fresh-a novel framework has been proposed in this paper which focuses to overcome the issue of blind forwarding of data by maintaining an optimum path between any pair of participating nodes available in the OppNet using machine learning techniques viz. pattern prediction, decision tree prediction, adamic-adar method for complex networks. Apart from this, ML-Fresh also uses the history of successful encounters between a pair of communicating nodes for route prediction in the background. Simulation results prove that the ML-Fresh outperforms the existing framework of Opportunistic Networks on the grounds of standard Quality-of-Service (QoS) parameters.

Assessments on routing protocols for delay tolerant network (DTN) or opportunistic network considered various metrics such as delivery ratio, overhead and delay, but energy consumption as a metric is not well analyzed. Since the energy aspect is now an issue, routing protocols should be considered from an energy consumption point of view. In this article, some basic routing protocols of the opportunistic network analyzed from the energy aspect alongside other standard metrics. Afterward, the performance of each routing protocol for different situations assessed through network effective factors. Finally, the simulation results show that Spray and Wait algorithm has better energy performance compared to Epidemic and PRoPHET. Analyzing a protocol with a single-relay selection that minimizes the transmission energy and increase the energy efficiency of all devices in a wireless network. This technique is analyze the opportunistic relaying in the paradigm of D2D communication and study the opportunistic schemes with a single relay selection to minimize energy consumption of the devices in a wireless network. The fact is that The D2D communication ensures that the energy consumed for the data relaying is negligible and The D2D communication ensures that the selection of the relaying device exploits the diversity from neighboring devices in order to minimize the energy consumed by the devices for forwarding the data to the BS.

An opportunistic network (OppNet) is a kind of mobile ad hoc network which does not require any predefined end-to-end path to deliver a message to a pair of nodes. OppNets are an infrastructure-less network, i.e. it does not require any repeaters or routers to be placed in the network. OppNets have a degrading factor due to lossy links and varying channel conditions. The two main parameters to improve route optimization are mobility models and routing protocols. Mobility models are those which depict the path or motion of mobile nodes while routing protocols help in forwarding messages as per the directions. The taxonomy of routing protocols is characterized into six categories: geographic-based, link-state-aware, context-aware, probabilistic, optimization-based and cross-layer. Opportunistic routing protocols use the broadcast nature of the wireless medium to allow hop-by-hop transmission. Opportunistic routing outperforms traditional routing in many ways, such as efficient utilization of broadcasting and better usage of spatial diversity of the wireless medium.

In intermittently connected delay tolerant wireless sensor networks, sensor data generated at sensor nodes should be delivered to a sink node using opportunistic contacts between intermittently connected nodes. Since there is no stable end-to-end routing path from a source node to a sink node in intermittently connected network, an opportunistic routing protocol to deliver sensor data efficiently is needed. In this paper, an improved opportunistic routing protocol is proposed, where both current delivery predictability and maximum delivery predictability are used together to decide whether sensor data should be forwarded or not to a contact node. The proposed protocol can reduce buffer overflow and thus increase the delivery ratio, which is one of the most important performance measures in delay tolerant wireless sensor networks. The performance of the proposed routing protocol is compared with that of PRoPHET protocol and FREAK protocol, by varying buffer sizes and the number of nodes, in terms of delivery ratio, overhead ratio, and delivery latency. Performance analysis results show that the proposed protocol has better delivery ratio, overhead ratio, and delivery latency than the PRoPHET protocol and FREAK protocol have, in most considered parameter values, with appropriate selection of message dissemination thresholds.

Delay tolerant network (DTN) protocol was proposed for a network where connectivity is not available. In DTN, a message is delivered to a destination node via store-carry-forward approach while using opportunistic contacts. Probabilistic routing protocol for intermittently connected networks (PRoPHET) is one of the widely studied DTN protocols. In PRoPHET, a message is forwarded to a contact node, if the contact node has a higher delivery predictability to the destination node of the message. In this paper, we propose an improved opportunistic routing protocol, where context information of average distance travelled and average time elapsed from the reception of a message to the delivery of the message to the destination node is used. In the proposed protocol, the average distance and average time are updated whenever a message is delivered to a destination node. Then, both average distance and average time as well as delivery predictability of PRoPHET protocol are used to decide a message forwarding. The performance of the proposed protocol is analyzed and compared with that of PRoPHET and reachable probability centrality (RPC) protocol, which is one of the latest protocols using the contact history information of a mobile node. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol has better performance than both PRoPHET and RPC, from the aspect of delivery ratio, overhead ratio, and delivery latency for varying buffer size, message generation interval, and the number of nodes.

Delay Tolerant Networks enable data transmission in different applications, mainly in environments where communication infrastructure is missing. The existence of links is casual and even when links are created, they are short in time and unstable/unreliable in terms of connectivity. Thus, underwater network applications tend to be delay tolerant. In this paper, we propose a mobility-aware routing protocol for underwater wireless sensor networks. The protocol is based on Focused Beam Routing (FBR) protocol and considers nodes’ next destination location when making forwarding decisions. The routing protocol is called Destination-aware Focused Beam Routing (D-FBR) protocol and we compare its performance with FBR protocol for different FBR angles and different applications. We use Delivery Probability (DP), Average Number of Hops (ANH), Overhead Ratio (OR) and simulate our scenarios by The ONE simulator. Simulation results show that, for D-FBR protocol, when FBR angle is 30 ∘ , OR and ANH is improved by 34.5 % and 23.1 %, respectively, while DP is 6.5 % lower, compared to FBR protocol. Both D-FBR and FBR outperform Epidemic Routing Protocol.

In infrastructure-less opportunistic networks (Oppnets), the routing of messages is a challenging task since nodes are not aware of the network topology and they look for an opportunity to send the message by finding or predicting a best temporary path at each hop towards the destination. As nodes perform various computations for next hop selection, a lot of battery power gets consumed, which in turn reduces the network lifetime. Thus, there is a clear demand for routing protocols for such networks which are energy-efficient and consume lesser power of nodes in forwarding a message. In this paper, a novel routing protocol named genetic algorithm-based energy-efficient routing (GAER) protocol for infrastructure-less Oppnets is proposed. This protocol uses a node's personal information, and then applies the genetic algorithm (GA) to select a better next hop among a group of neighbour nodes for the message to be routed to the destination. With the application of GA, optimal results are obtained that help in the selection of the best possible node as the next hop, which in turn, leads to prolonged battery life. Simulation results show that GAER outperforms the Epidemic, PROPHET, and Spray and Wait protocols in terms of messages delivered, overhead ratio, average residual energy, and number of dead nodes. The results obtained for average latency and average buffer time using GAER are comparable to those obtained for the aforementioned protocols.