A Fuzzy Logic-based Delivery Framework for Optimized Routing in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Limited radio transmission range, sporadic node densities and power limitations, transform mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) into intermittently connected MANETs (IC- MANs) where data routing process is disrupted in the absence of end-to-end routing path. In a bid to address this problem, various "store-carry-forward (SCF)" routing algorithms have been proposed in the literature that exploit the mobility and storage space of the nodes. In majority of these algorithms, performance is quantified in terms of delivery probability. Unfortunately in a mobile environment like ICMANs where there is uncertainty about the future state of the network, delivery probability alone cannot provide a good enough measure of message selection, even under community based mobility conditions containing historical statistics of correlated movement. As such, this paper presents a novel optimized data delivery framework, Fuzzy logic based Delivery Framework (.FLDF), that utilizes Fuzzy logic for effective message delivery in ICAMNs. In the proposed mechanism, whenever any two nodes meet each other in the network, each node employs the Fuzzy logic to evaluate the delivery preferences of all possible messages based on various fuzzy sets. Following such evaluation, the nodes select and store messages that have higher delivery preference in the future. Simulation results demonstrate the enhanced delivery performance offered by the proposed FLDF over existing SCF schemes.