Data forwarding with selectively partial flooding in opportunistic networks

Abstract

Opportunistic network is an evolution of the Mobile Ad hoc Network, which is composed of many mobile nodes. In opportunistic networks, there exist intermittent connecting communication paths between any two nodes and nodes try to realize communication with each other relying on the mobility of nodes. Furthermore, the frequent movements of nodes in networks lead to dynamic change of the network topology, and nodes have not any prior information and knowledge about the changeable network topology. However, the traditional data forwarding approaches do not solve the above issues, therefore they are unusable for opportunistic networks. In this work, a novel data forwarding approach is proposed to apply to opportunistic networks, which is called as selective probability-based flooding data forwarding scheme (SPF). It is a advanced approaches based on the conventional flood forwarding, and it chooses fewer neighboring nodes to forward data with contrast to conventional flooding scheme. These chosen nodes have more communication chances with the destination node than other neighboring nodes. With the traditional flooding method, data is forwarded to all neighboring nodes, which let data reaches the destination as fast as possible, so it has the minimum end-to-end delays and maximum delivery ratio. However, its disadvantage is that the large amount of forwarding data excessively uses the network resources. With SPF, the goal is to decrease the network traffic by selecting partial neighboring nodes based on the connecting likelihood with the destinations. Finally, the network performance is evaluated through simulations among the SPF, flooding, and partial flooding. The simulation results show our SPF can provide better performance than other two forwarding schemes while decreasing the network traffic.