An Enhanced Community-based Routing Assisted by Ferry in Opportunistic Networks

Routing is a very challenging task in opportunistic networks due to the lack of continuous end-to-end path between nodes. To improve the routing performance, a type of community-based routing protocol is presented. This routing generally turns to the social attributes of nodes to construct the community, and utilizes community characteristics (nodes within the same community come in contact with each other more frequently) to select the relay nodes and make the forwarding decisions. Unfortunately, this routing has a problem of transmission bottleneck between communities. To address this issue, we propose an enhanced community-based routing assisted by ferry in opportunistic networks. This routing resorts to some super-nodes as ferry nodes to ferry messages between communities in order to overcome the network division. The simulation results demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed scheme by comparing it with existing routing schemes.