An Energy-Efficient Routing Protocol for Infrastructure-Less Opportunistic Networks

In this paper, an energy-aware version of a recently proposed History-Based Prediction for Routing (HBPR) protocol for opportunistic networks (OppNets) called energy-efficient HBPR (AEHBPR) is proposed, which saves the energy consumption by avoiding unnecessary packets transmission in the network and by clearing the buffer of nodes carrying the copies of the already delivered packets. The proposed AEHBPR is simulated using the ONE simulator, using synthetic and real mobility traces, showing a superior performance compared to HBPR and AEProphet, in terms of average remaining energy, number of dead nodes, number of delivered messages, and overhead ratio, where AEProphet is the ProPHet routing protocol for OppNets, on which the same energy-aware mechanism has been implemented.

I. Introduction

In OppNets, the communication routes between the nodes are built dynamically on the fly, in a store-carry-and-forward fashion. Due to the highly mobile nature of the nodes and the uncertain mobility patterns, the disconnection of links among the nodes occurs frequently, yielding the so-called intermittent connectivity. The basic characteristics of OppNets include limited battery power, broken links, limited storage, to name a few [1]. Due of these facts, a packet delivery from source to destination is not necessary guaranteed. However, the applications of OppNets are diverse as they can be deployed in many real life situations such as disaster relief, military operations, wildlife monitoring, health care monitoring, to name a few [1], [2].