Integrated Routing Protocol for Opportunistic Networks

In opportunistic networks the existence of a simultaneous path is not assumed to transmit a message between a sender and a receiver. Information about the context in which the users communicate is a key piece of knowledge to design efficient routing protocols in opportunistic networks. But this kind of information is not always available. When users are very isolated, context information cannot be distributed, and cannot be used for taking efficient routing decisions. In such cases, context oblivious based schemes are only way to enable communication between users. As soon as users become more social, context data spreads in the network, and context based routing becomes an efficient solution. In this paper we design an integrated routing protocol that is able to use context data as soon as it becomes available and falls back to dissemination based routing when context information is not available. Then, we provide a comparison between Epidemic and PROPHET, these are representative of context oblivious and context aware routing protocols. Our results show that integrated routing protocol is able to provide better result in term of message delivery probability and message delay in both cases when context information about users is available or not.Comment: 8 pages, 12 figures, (IJACSA) International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Application

Socially-Aware Networking: A Survey

The widespread proliferation of handheld devices enables mobile carriers to be connected at anytime and anywhere. Meanwhile, the mobility patterns of mobile devices strongly depend on the users' movements, which are closely related to their social relationships and behaviors. Consequently, today's mobile networks are becoming increasingly human centric. This leads to the emergence of a new field which we call socially-aware networking (SAN). One of the major features of SAN is that social awareness becomes indispensable information for the design of networking solutions. This emerging paradigm is applicable to various types of networks (e.g. opportunistic networks, mobile social networks, delay tolerant networks, ad hoc networks, etc) where the users have social relationships and interactions. By exploiting social properties of nodes, SAN can provide better networking support to innovative applications and services. In addition, it facilitates the convergence of human society and cyber physical systems. In this paper, for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, we present a survey of this emerging field. Basic concepts of SAN are introduced. We intend to generalize the widely-used social properties in this regard. The state-of-the-art research on SAN is reviewed with focus on three aspects: routing and forwarding, incentive mechanisms and data dissemination. Some important open issues with respect to mobile social sensing and learning, privacy, node selfishness and scalability are discussed.Comment: accepted. IEEE Systems Journal, 201

Evaluation of Opportunistic Routing Algorithms on Opportunistic Mobile Sensor Networks with Infrastructure Assistance

Recently the increasing number of sensors integrated in smartphones, especially the iPhone and Android phones, has motivated the development of routing algorithms for Opportunistic Mobile Sensor Networks (OppMSNs). Although there are many existing opportunistic routing algorithms, researchers still have an ambiguous understanding of how these schemes perform on OppMSNs with heterogeneous architecture, which comprises various kinds of devices. In this work, we investigate the performance of well-known routing algorithms in realistic scenarios. To this end, we propose a heterogeneous architecture including fixed infrastructure, mobile infrastructure, and mobile phones. The proposed architecture focuses on how to utilize the available, low cost short-range radios of mobile phones for data gathering and dissemination. We also propose new realistic mobility models and metrics. Selected routing protocols are simulated and evaluated with the proposed heterogeneous architecture, mobility models, and transmission interfaces under various constraints, such as limited buffer size and time-to-live (TTL). Results show that some protocols suffer long TTL, while others suffer short TTL. We further study the benefit of fixed infrastructure in network performance, and learn that most of the opportunistic routing algorithms cannot benefit from the advantage of fixed infrastructure since they are designed for mobile nodes. Finally, we show that heterogeneous architecture need heterogeneous routing algorithms, such as a combination of Epidemic, Spray and Wait, and context-based algorithms

Friendship and Selfishness Forwarding: applying machine learning techniques to Opportunistic Networks data forwarding

Opportunistic networks could become the solution to provide communication support in both cities where the cellular network could be overloaded, and in scenarios where a fixed infrastructure is not available, like in remote and developing regions. A critical issue that still requires a satisfactory solution is the design of an efficient data delivery solution. Social characteristics are recently being considered as a promising alternative. Most opportunistic network applications rely on the different mobile devices carried by users, and whose behavior affects the use of the device itself. This work presents the "Friendship and Selfishness Forwarding" (FSF) algorithm. FSF analyses two aspects to make message forwarding decisions when a contact opportunity arises: First, it classifies the friendship strength among a pair of nodes by using a machine learning algorithm to quantify the friendship strength among pairs of nodes in the network. Next, FSF assesses the relay node selfishness to consider those cases in which, despite a strong friendship with the destination, the relay node may not accept to receive the message because it is behaving selfishly, or because its device has resource constraints in that moment. By using trace-driven simulations through the ONE simulator, we show that the FSF algorithm outperforms previously proposed schemes in terms of delivery rate, average cost, and efficiency.Comment: 27 pages, 25 figure

A Survey of Delay Tolerant Networks Routing Protocols

Advances in Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) have revolutionized the digital age to a point where animate and inanimate objects can be used as a communication channel. In addition, the ubiquity of mobile phones with increasing capabilities and ample resources means people are now effectively mobile sensors that can be used to sense the environment as well as data carriers. These objects, along with their devices, form a new kind of networks that are characterized by frequent disconnections, resource constraints and unpredictable or stochastic mobility patterns. A key underpinning in these networks is routing or data dissemination protocols that are designed specifically to handle the aforementioned characteristics. Therefore, there is a need to review state-of-the-art routing protocols, categorize them, and compare and contrast their approaches in terms of delivery rate, resource consumption and end-to-end delay. To this end, this paper reviews 63 unicast, multicast and coding-based routing protocols that are designed specifically to run in delay tolerant or challenged networks. We provide an extensive qualitative comparison of all protocols, highlight their experimental setup and outline their deficiencies in terms of design and research methodology. Apart from that, we review research that aims to exploit studies on social networks and epidemiology in order to improve routing protocol performance. Lastly, we provide a list of future research directions.Comment: 56 page

PRIF: A Privacy-Preserving Interest-Based Forwarding Scheme for Social Internet of Vehicles

Recent advances in Socially Aware Networks (SANs) have allowed its use in many domains, out of which social Internet of vehicles (SIOV) is of prime importance. SANs can provide a promising routing and forwarding paradigm for SIOV by using interest-based communication. Though able to improve the forwarding performance, existing interest-based schemes fail to consider the important issue of protecting users' interest information. In this paper, we propose a PRivacy-preserving Interest-based Forwarding scheme (PRIF) for SIOV, which not only protects the interest information, but also improves the forwarding performance. We propose a privacy-preserving authentication protocol to recognize communities among mobile nodes. During data routing and forwarding, a node can know others' interests only if they are affiliated with the same community. Moreover, to improve forwarding performance, a new metric {\em community energy} is introduced to indicate vehicular social proximity. Community energy is generated when two nodes encounter one another and information is shared among them. PRIF considers this energy metric to select forwarders towards the destination node or the destination community. Security analysis indicates PRIF can protect nodes' interest information. In addition, extensive simulations have been conducted to demonstrate that PRIF outperforms the existing algorithms including the BEEINFO, Epidemic, and PRoPHET

Using emulation to validate applications on opportunistic networks

The increasing trend on wireless-connected devices makes opportunistic networking a promising alternative to existing infrastructure-based networks. However, on these networks there is neither guarantee about the availability of the connections nor on the topology of the network. The development of opportunistic applications, i.e., applications running over opportunistic networks, is still in early stages. This is due to lack of tools to support the process in such uncertain conditions. Indeed, many tools have been introduced to study and characterize opportunistic networks, but none of them is focused on helping developers to conceive opportunistic applications. In this paper, we argue that the gap between opportunistic applications development and network characterization can be filled with network emulation. First, this position paper points out important challenges about the development of opportunistic applications. Then, in order to cope with these challenges, it details a set of requirements that an emulator should meet to allow the testing of such applications.Comment: Positioning paper, 11 page

Improved Opportunistic Sleeping Algorithms for LAN Switches

Network interfaces in most LAN computing devices are usually severely under-utilized, wasting energy while waiting for new packets to arrive. In this paper, we present two algorithms for opportunistically powering down unused network interfaces in order to save some of that wasted energy. We compare our proposals to the best known opportunistic method, and show that they provide much greater power savings inflicting even lower delays to Internet traffic

A One-Hop Information Based Geographic Routing Protocol for Delay Tolerant MANETs

Delay and Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTNs) may lack continuous network connectivity. Routing in DTNs is thus a challenge since it must handle network partitioning, long delays, and dynamic topology. Meanwhile, routing protocols of the traditional Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) cannot work well due to the failure of its assumption that most network connections are available. In this article, a geographic routing protocol is proposed for MANETs in delay tolerant situations, by using no more than one-hop information. A utility function is designed for implementing the under-controlled replication strategy. To reduce the overheads caused by message flooding, we employ a criterion so as to evaluate the degree of message redundancy. Consequently a message redundancy coping mechanism is added to our routing protocol. Extensive simulations have been conducted and the results show that when node moving speed is relatively low, our routing protocol outperforms the other schemes such as Epidemic, Spray and Wait, FirstContact in delivery ratio and average hop count, while introducing an acceptable overhead ratio into the network.Comment: 14 page

A Survey of Protocols for Intermittently Connected Delay-Tolerant Wireless Sensor Networks

Intermittently Connected Delay-Tolerant Wireless Sensor Networks (ICDT-WSNs), a branch of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), have features of WSNs and the intermittent connectivity of Delay-Tolerant Networks (DTNs). The applications of ICDT-WSNs are increasing in recent years, however, the communication protocols suitable for this category of networks often fall short. Most of the existing communication protocols are designed for either WSNs or DTNs and tend to be inadequate for direct use in ICDT-WSNs. This survey summarizes characteristics of ICDT-WSNs and their communication protocol requirements, and examines the communication protocols designed for WSNs and DTNs in recent years from the perspective of ICDT-WSNs. Opportunities for future research in ICDT-WSNs are also outlined