A Direction Entropy-Based Forwarding Scheme in an Opportunistic Network

Abstract

In an opportunistic network, one of the most challenging issues is the equilibrium of the network traffic and transmission delay for forwarding messages. To resolve this problem, we propose a new forwarding scheme, called the direction entropy-based forwarding scheme (DEFS), using the main direction and direction entropy based on the information collected about the directions of the nodes in the network. Since each node sends a message to another node with a different location and less direction entropy, DEFS utilizes those nodes that are more likely to travel to various locations to forward the messages to the destination nodes. Experiments were performed on the network simulator NS-2. The results show that DEFS provides better balance than the typical forwarding schemes, such as Epidemic, PRoPHET, and WAIT.