Acceleration of Sociality-Aware Message Routing in Opportunistic Networks

In this paper, we focus on the message routing in Opportunistic Networks (OppNets), and propose a generic method to enhance the routing performance of existing protocols. Most of the current OppNet protocols calculate the utility value for each node based on their social characteristics such as the degree centricity, and make forwarding decisions by comparing utility values with encountered nodes. However, certain protocols such as PRoPHET and Spray-and-Focus impose strict limitations on the number of message copies, leading to a situation where, once a message copy is transmitted, no additional copies can be made even if a node with a much better utility value is encountered later. Moreover, since existing protocols unconditionally forward messages to the nodes with higher utility values regardless of their distance to the destination, it results in the filling of input buffers with redundant messages that do not contribute to the increase of the message delivery rate. This paper introduces innovative methods to overcome these issues whose performance is experimentally evaluated through simulations.