Analysis of routing and forwarding protocols in opportunistic networks

The role of opportunistic networks can be crucial in data transmission. Here message forwarding depends solely on node cooperation. Opportunistic networks use store-and-carry forward mechanism. The frequent disconnection of nodes is very common in these networks because of dynamic nature of mobile nodes. Therefore use of suitable routing protocol is very important in message delivery. In this paper, three social context aware routing protocols that support message forwarding in opportunistic networks i.e. HiBop, Propicman and CAOR are analysed in terms of performance metrics viz. delivery probability, overhead ratio, number of hops and delay. The results show that CAOR outperform the other two protocols in all these aspects. The delivery probability of CAOR is higher whereas the overhead ratio, number of hops and delay are less than those for HiBop and Propicman routing protocols. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license