Store-Carry-Cooperative Forward Routing with Information Epidemics Control for Data Delivery in Opportunistic Networks

• Main Authors: Aung, Cherry Ye, Ho, Ivan Wang-Hei, Chong, Peter Han Joo
• Other Authors: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: Cooperative Forwarding; Opportunistic Networks
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/86894; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/44248
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Data delivery in opportunistic networks requires robustness and resiliency due to the mobility and probabilistic propagation channels caused by fading. Besides the 100% data delivery, delivery with minimum delay, overhead, buffer consumption, and controlling unnecessary transmissions/replications are equally important. In this paper, we propose a data delivery solution for opportunistic networks. The solution comprises two main algorithms: store-carry-cooperative forward routing and information epidemic control. In the data forwarding, nodes proactively monitor and exploit the direct/two-hop cooperative forwarding opportunities and adaptively switch between the cooperative forwarding and reactive store-carry-forward routing. An information epidemics control algorithm, which provides earlier control signal distribution time and faster recovery rate, is also proposed. The susceptible-infected-recovered model is used to study the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism. Extensive network performance evaluation is conducted under a wide range of scenarios, which include fading environments, obstacle-constrained environments, and mobile social network environments. We show that: 1) the information epidemics control mechanism provides higher vaccination rate and recovery rate; 2) proactive replication incurs a number of unnecessary transmissions; 3) monitoring the vicinity and exploiting the opportunity shorten the data delivery delay; and 4) with the integrated solution, a robust data delivery is achieved and a substantial amount of unnecessary transmissions are well deterred.