An efficient energy-aware probabilistic routing approach for mobile opportunistic networks

Abstract

Routing is a concerning and challenging research hotspot in Mobile Opportunistic Networks (MONs) due to nodes’ mobility, connection intermittency, limited nodes’ energy and the dynamic changing quality of the wireless channel. However, only one or several of the above factors are considered in most current routing approaches. In this paper, we propose an efficient energy-aware probabilistic routing approach for MONs. Firstly, we explore and exploit the regularity of nodes’ mobility and the encounter probability among nodes to decide the time when to forward messages to other nodes. Secondly, by controlling the energy fairness among nodes, we try to prolong the network lifetime. Thirdly, by fully taking the dynamic changing quality of the wireless channel into consideration, we effectively reduce the retransmission number of messages. Additionally, we adopt a forwarding authority transfer policy for each message, which can effectively control the number of replicas for each message. Simulation results show that the proposed approach outperforms the existing routing algorithms in terms of the delivery ratio and the overhead ratio.