Optimal encounter-based routing via objects with periodic behaviours

In MANETs, communication often relies on finding a set of sequential opportunistic encounters between pairs of mobile nodes. In this context, understanding mobile node behaviour is essential to design effective and efficient network protocols. One characteristic that emerges from node mobility is that mobile nodes often have periodic behaviours. In this paper we take advantage of periodically repeated encounters between nodes. Given these encounter patterns, we show how to model routing as an optimization problem in a graph with a domain-specific constraint. Further, we propose polynomial time algorithms to find the optimal and near-optimal solutions. Experimental results show that our proposed approaches always find better routes compared to other state-of-the-art protocols.