Benefiting from the community structure in opportunistic forwarding

Abstract

In Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs), an end-to-end connectivity cannot be assumed for node mobility and lack of infrastructure. Due to the uncertainty in nodal mobility, routing in DTNs becomes a challenging problem. To cope with this, many researchers proposed opportunistic routing algorithms based on some utilities. However, these simple metrics may only capture one facet of the single node's mobility process, which cannot reflect the inherent structure of the networks well. Recently, some researchers introduce the Complex network analysis (CNA) to formulate and predict the future contact in DTNs. The community structure is one of the most important properties of CNA. And it reveals the inherent structure of the complex network. In this paper, we present a community-based single-copy forwarding protocol for DTNs routing, which efficiently utilizes the community structure to improve the forwarding efficiency. Simulation results are presented to support the effectiveness of our scheme.