LOC: Location-aware opportunistic content forwarding using direction vectors

In opportunistic networks, nodes do not have prior knowledge of the routes to their intended destinations. The major challenge is to keep the communication cost minimum during the transfer of information towards intended destinations. An improvement can be realised if nodes are aware of their current position in the network through some technological means such as GPS, GSM or WLAN access points. With the knowledge of nodes position in the network, high message directivity can be achieved by using simple concepts of direction vectors. Based on this observation, this paper presents a new algorithm named as Location-aware opportunistic content forwarding (LOC), which is compared against two other algorithms previously proposed. The experimental results have shown that the new algorithm performed extremely well, not only in terms of overall message delivery ratio but also successfully manages to reduce the communication cost with minimum delay.