A Low-Delay Routing Algorithm for Opportunistic Networks

Abstract

In the Epidemic Routing (ER) algorithm for opportunistic networks, random pair-wise exchanges of messages among mobile hosts ensure eventual message delivery. However, ER does not utilize the available network topology information to exchange data packets when two nodes encounter. To address the problem, we propose a low-delay routing algorithm based on exchange of two-hop neighborhood information (LDREN), which exchanges two-hop neighborhood information during the exchange process of packet indexes and firstly sends packets which are within two hops distant from their destinations to reduce packet delay. Moreover, in the process of sensing encountered nodes, LDREN uses ECHO messages to delete the packets reaching their destinations from nodes’ buffer. Simulation results show that LDREN outperforms the ER algorithm and one of its present improvements, ARER (Adaptive Randomized Epidemic Routing), in terms of success rate, end-to-end delay, and memory overhead.