A utility-based buffer management policy for improving data dissemination in opportunistic networks

In opportunistic networks, most existing buffer management policies including scheduling and passive dropping policies are mainly for routing protocols. In this paper, we proposed a Utility-based Buffer Management strategy (UBM) for data dissemination in op- portunistic networks. In UBM, we first design a method of computing the utility values of caching messages according to the interest of nodes and the delivery probability of messages, and then propose an overall buffer management policy based on the utility. UBM driven by receivers completely implements not only cach- ing policies, passive and proactive dropping policies, but also scheduling policies of send- ers. Simulation results show that, compared with some classical dropping strategies, UBM can obtain higher delivery ratio and lower delay latency by using smaller network cost.