A Probabilistic Encounter and Distance-based Routing Protocol for Opportunistic Networks

An Opportunistic Network (OppNet) is one of the latest domain of wireless communication where information is transferred from the source to the destination without any infrastructure, internet connectivity and any predefined network topology. The mobile nodes participating in the network contribute in establishing a connectivity between the nodes to transmit the information from the source to the destination using a store-carry and forward mechanism. The nodes store the information in their in-built buffer until a suitable forwarder is available within their wi-fi/bluetooth transmission range. Designing a routing protocol in OppNet is thus a challenging task. This paper proposes a Probabilistic Encounter and Distance-based Routing Protocol (P-EDR) for Opportunistic Networks, which is designed as a combination the ProPHet and the Encounter and Distance-based Routing (EDR) protocols. Simulation results are presented, showing that P-EDR outperforms the EDR, History-based Prediction for Routing (HBPR) and ProPHet routing protocols in terms of message delivery probability, messages overhead ratio and number of messages dropped.