FARS: A Fairness-aware Routing Strategy for Mobile Opportunistic Networks

Abstract

Mobile opportunistic network is a kind of ad hoc networks, which implements the multi-hop routing communication with the help of contact opportunity brought about by the mobility of the nodes. It always uses opportunistic data transmission mode based on store-carry-forward to solve intermittent connect problem of link. Although many routing schemes have been proposed, most of them adopt the greedy transmission mode to pursue a higher delivery efficient, which result in unfairness extremely among nodes. While, this issue has not been paid enough attention up to now. In this paper, we analyzed the main factors that reflect fairness among nodes, modeled routing selection as a multiple attribute decision making problem, and proposed our Fairness-aware Routing Strategy, named FARS. To evaluate the performance of our FARS, extensive simulations and analysis have been done based on a real-life dataset and a synthetic dataset, respectively. The results show that, compared with other existing protocols, our FARS can greatly improve the fairness of the nodes when ensuring the overall delivery performance of the network.