Group aware cooperative routing for opportunistic networks under resource constraints

Opportunistic networks are a new evolution of mobile ad hoc networks composed of intermittently connected nodes, in which the routing for the dynamic topology is a challenging issue. In opportunistic networks, the mobile nodes with common interest or close relationship may form into groups and move together, which brings us a good feature to employ when designing the routing protocol for opportunistic networks under resource constraints. Our main idea in this paper is to maximize the message delivery probability in a group-aware opportunistic network under the constraints of bandwidth and buffer space. Embedded this idea, we propose a cooperative routing protocol using the group feature, which includes the cooperative message transfer scheme and the buffer management strategy. In the cooperative message transfer scheme, the limited bandwidth is considered and the message transfer priorities are designed to maximize the delivery probability. In the buffer management strategy, by considering the constraint of buffer space, we propose the cooperative message caching scheme and the dropping order of the messages is designed to minimize the reduced delivery probability. Finally, we conduct the simulations to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed routing protocol.