An effective buffer management policy for opportunistic networks

Abstract

Opportunistic networks are wireless networks where disruptions may occur frequently due to the challenging environments. Multiple message replicas have to be propagated to improve delivery probability; combining long-term storage with replication gives rise to a high storage overhead. Many forward/drop policies have been proposed to achieve high delivery ratio, low latencies and low overheads. These policies have improved the performance of opportunistic networks to some extent. However, they all have their own disadvantages. Therefore, an efficient buffer management policy based on the average encounter frequency and the average encounter duration of nodes is proposed in this paper. Simulation results show that our buffer management policy has better performance than the existing DO, DF, MDC-SR and the ACF-based policy.