A Solution Proposal to the Preferred Nodes Problem in Social-Based Opportunistic Protocols

Opportunistic networks are formed by self-organizing wireless nodes, where data delivery is not guaranteed, due to intermittent end-to-end connectivity. In order to infer future contact opportunities, information extracted from the context of users has been used to forward messages for opportunistic networks. Yet one open issue in this approach is the constant usage of repeated nodes considered as the most likely to deliver the messages, causing overload and a faster consume of battery resources. Thus, this paper proposes a new social-based forwarding protocol that has efficient energy consumption. The proposed protocol obtained better results on message distribution and reducing energy consumption of preferred nodes in comparison to Epidemic, PROPHET and BUBBLE Rap protocols.