An improved opportunistic routing protocol based on context information of mobile nodes

Abstract

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.