Store-Carry-Cooperative Forward Routing with Information Epidemics Control for Data Delivery in Opportunistic Networks

Data delivery in opportunistic networks requires robustness and resiliency due to the mobility and probabilistic propagation channels caused by fading. Besides the 100% data delivery, delivery with minimum delay, overhead, buffer consumption, and controlling unnecessary transmissions/replications are equally important. In this paper, we propose a data delivery solution for opportunistic networks. The solution comprises two main algorithms: store-carry-cooperative forward routing and information epidemic control. In the data forwarding, nodes proactively monitor and exploit the direct/two-hop cooperative forwarding opportunities and adaptively switch between the cooperative forwarding and reactive store-carry-forward routing. An information epidemics control algorithm, which provides earlier control signal distribution time and faster recovery rate, is also proposed. The susceptible-infected-recovered model is used to study the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism. Extensive network performance evaluation is conducted under a wide range of scenarios, which include fading environments, obstacle-constrained environments, and mobile social network environments. We show that: 1) the information epidemics control mechanism provides higher vaccination rate and recovery rate; 2) proactive replication incurs a number of unnecessary transmissions; 3) monitoring the vicinity and exploiting the opportunity shorten the data delivery delay; and 4) with the integrated solution, a robust data delivery is achieved and a substantial amount of unnecessary transmissions are well deterred.