CREST: An Opportunistic Forwarding Protocol Based on Conditional Residual Time

Opportunistic forwarding protocols take advantage of contact opportunities to route data in intermittently connected environments. In these environments, a fully connected path between the source and destination may not always exist and the contact schedules of all the nodes are not known in advance. Hence, one of the key challenges for a node is to make effective forwarding decisions using only a limited knowledge of the contact behavior of the nodes in the network. Based on an analysis of human mobility traces that we collected from our office environment, we introduce a new link metric, conditional residual time, that accurately estimates the time remaining for a pair of nodes to meet using only the local knowledge of their past contacts. We then propose a distributed protocol called CREST, that uses the conditional residual time to opportunistically forward messages between pairs of nodes. Experimental results show that CREST has a lower end-to-end delay compared to protocols that depend on future contact schedules and global knowledge of the contact behavior across the network. Furthermore, by disseminating only a few additional copies of the message, the delivery ratio of CREST improves significantly and is comparable to that of the flooding protocol.