A Data Dissemination Method Based on Region Type Correlations for Mobile Opportunistic Networks

Abstract

In Mobile Opportunistic Networks (MONs), due to the node movements and the uncontrollable on/off switches of the carried communication devices, the contacts between nodes may be scarce and momentary, and thus a data packet should be transferred through some discrete hops. To avoid the costly flooding of data packets, the data packets are typically disseminated to some relay nodes selected by data holders. However, the mobility patterns of nodes will become different in different types of regions (such as residential regions, commercial regions, scenery regions, or industrial regions); i.e., the movement directions and movement ranges of nodes are frequently varied when the nodes move among various regions. At present, the issues regarding the region types and region type correlations have not been investigated for the data dissemination in existing works. To this end, we propose a Region Type based Data Dissemination Method (RTDDM) for MONs, which exploits the region type correlations and selects the proper relay nodes through a Markov decision model. To verify the performance of RTDDM, we give some theoretical analysis as well as an elaborated simulation study, the results of which show that RTDDM can improve the delivery ratio and reduce the delivery delay, especially in the applications with various region types.