Towards designing a routing protocol for opportunistic networks

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

PurposeIn this study, we discuss three DTN routing protocols, these are epidemic, PRoPHET and spray and wait routing protocols. A special simulator will be used; that is opportunistic network environment (ONE) to create a network environment. Spray and wait has highest delivery rate and low latency in most of the cases. Hence, spray and wait have better performance than others. This analysis of the performance of DTN protocols helps the researcher to learn better of these protocols in the different environment.Design/methodology/approachDelay-Tolerant Network (DTN) is a network designed to operate effectively over extreme distances, such as those encountered in space communications or on an interplanetary scale. In such an environment, nodes are occasional communication and are available among hubs, and determinations of the next node communications are not confirmed. In such network environment, the packet can be transferred by searching current efficient route available for a particular node. Due to the uncertainty of packet transfer route, DTN is affected by a variety of factors such as packet size, communication cost, node activity, etc.FindingsSpray and wait have highest delivery rate and low latency in most of the cases. Hence, spray and wait have better performance than others.Originality/valueThe primary goal of the paper is to extend these works in an attempt to offer a better understanding of the behavior of different DTN routing protocols with delivery probability, latency and overhead ratio that depend on various amounts of network parameters such as buffer size, number of nodes, movement ratio, time to live, movement range, transmission range and message generation rate. In this study, we discuss three DTN routing protocols: these are epidemic, PRoPHET and spray and wait routing protocols. A special simulator will be used; that is opportunistic network environment (ONE) to create a network environment. Spray and wait have highest delivery rate and low latency in most of the cases. Hence, spray and wait have better performance than others. This analysis of the performance of DTN protocols helps the researcher to learn better of these protocols in the different environment.

The adaptive routing protocol recently proposed by researchers for opportunistic networks often makes an assumption that when each node makes an intelligent decision of choosing a best forwarder node to route its messages, the chosen forwarder will often have a large buffer storage and will always altruistically devote its resources for forwarding those messages towards their destination nodes. However, copies of messages fill up buffers on receiving intermediate nodes very quickly when few nodes become more central than the other nodes and when the connectivity becomes more and more intermittent. This paper investigates about a more realistic behavior of mobile opportunistic nodes where the storage buffer in nodes gets full very quickly, especially at the more centric nodes, when such nodes store, carry and forward messages for other nodes. Because of these practical issues, messages passed to most popular nodes just get dropped when the buffers get filled up which ultimately results in the performance degradation of the network. We investigate the cases of buffer overflow and analyze how the performance of a considered opportunistic networking environment can get degraded when buffers get overflowed. We then propose an algorithmic approach where nodes choose the potential nodes based not only on potential nodes' predicted connectivity to other nodes but also based on the other factors such as available buffer space in the potential intermediate nodes and the intermediate nodes' willingness to store, carry and forward messages for other nodes. Our initial simulation based experiment results are encouraging and indicate that a congestion aware adaptive routing protocol performs well and the overall network performance increases by means of the number of messages delivered when the message forwarding is constrained by the buffer size.

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.

With the widespread popularity and usage of ICT around the world, the ubiquity of data collection and transmission change our daily life and the society. Opportunistic Mobile Social Networks (OMSNs), formed by people moving around with mobile devices, enhance spontaneous communication among users that opportunistically encounter each other can be exploited to improve the performance of data forwarding. Existing protocols take advantage of spatial contact frequency and social characteristics to enhance transmission performance. However, they have not exploited enough of the relations and the effects between geographical information, social features and user interests. In this paper, we first evaluate these three characteristics of users and design a routing protocol call Geo-Social-Interest (GSI) protocol to select optimal relay nodes. We adopt Improved Optimal Routing (IOR) strategy to enhanced dynamic social features to more capture node’s social behavior to efficiently improve the routing protocol. We compare the performance of GSI to Epidemic and SimBet routing protocols using real INFOCOM06 data sets. The experiment results demonstrate that GSI overcomes the other protocols with highest data delivery ratio and low communication overhead.

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

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.

Opportunistic Networks (Opp-Nets) provide the capability to interact and transfer information between spontaneous mobile nodes. In these networks, the routing of messages, which involves the selection of the best intermediate hop for the relay of message packets, is one of the most important issues. This is primarily due to the non-availability of prerequisite knowledge about the network topology and configuration. This paper presents a community interaction-based routing protocol for Opp-Nets that may be used to select appropriate intermediate nodes as hops. The selection is based on the interaction point probability and social activeness of the nodes, which are calculated and analyzed at the sender and, each, intermediate nodes. The results for the proposed protocol are obtained using the ONE simulator, and analytically and graphically compared with other contemporary routing protocols to show its effectiveness.KeywordsOpportunistic networksRoutingCommunity interactionONE simulator

Research on vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) has focused primarily on efficient routing protocol design under conditions where there are relatively large numbers of closely spaced vehicles, typical of major highways and urban areas. These routing protocols are designed principally for fully connected networks and are not suitable for packet delivery in a sparse, partially connected VANET. In rural areas, vehicle densities are low and roadway communication infrastructure is scarce, leading to long periods where vehicle-to-vehicle or vehicleto- roadside communications is infrequent, interrupted, or simply not possible. These attributes characterize a sparse VANET, and are characteristic of delay tolerant networks (DTNs). In this paper, we examine the challenges of VANETs in sparse network conditions, review alternatives including epidemic routing and propose a Border node Based Routing (BBR) protocol for partially connected VANETs. Unlike many VANET protocols that assume location awareness or mobility patterns to aid in routing decisions, BBR is designed to function in domains where location and mobility information is not available, as is typical in rugged terrain conditions. The BBR protocol can tolerate network partition due to low node density and high node mobility. The performance of this protocol is evaluated in OPNET TM with a Random Waypoint mobility model and a Geographic and Traffic Information (GTI) based mobility model that captures typical highway conditions. The simulation results are compared with those obtained using the Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol and with an epidemic routing protocol. The simulation results show that BBR performs well for partially connected VANETs where other protocols fail and provides the advantage of not relying on a location service required by other protocols proposed for VANETs.