Improving data delivery in opportunistic networks using probabilistic forwarding

Abstract

As the number of opportunistic networking applications increases, the need for an effective routing scheme is becoming increasingly urgent. We propose the HEC-PF scheme for effective data forwarding in opportunistic networks. The scheme modifies the aggressive forwarding phase of our previous H-EC scheme by implementing a new probabilistic forwarding feature, which decides whether to forward a message to a newly encountered node based on the delivery probability. The performance in terms of delivery latency and completion ratio is evaluated by simulations. The results show that the HEC-PF scheme outperforms the EC and H-EC schemes, and the performance gain is even more substantial when network connectivity is extremely poor. We also show that its completion ratio improves as the maximum forwarding distance or the hop distance considered when calculating the delivery probability increases. The effectiveness of the HEC-PF scheme makes it an ideal solution for effective data delivery in opportunistic networks.