Degree Contact DC-Epidemic Routing Protocol For Opportunistic Networks

Opportunistic Network (OppNet) is a sparse network, finding a stable and reliable path from the source to the destination may not easily achievable. However, if a node transmits a message to all its encounters nodes, its batteries will be consumed insufficiently. Many researches have been done on routing algorithms in opportunistic networks, but few of them consider the energy issue. In this paper, we propose Degree and Contact Epidemic (DC-Epidemic) routing protocol, which is an energy-aware routing scheme for an opportunistic network. The DC-Epidemic routing protocol is based on that to reach a fast delivery with a minimum number of message copies, it is recommended to copy only when the number of neighbors equal to a certain calculated threshold. This threshold calculated based on the maximum degree and contact probability values of the system. We compare the performance of DC-Epidemic routing protocol with basic contact epidemic routing protocol. This comparison conducted using both mathematical analysis and experiment scenario. The results show that DC-Epidemic routing protocol can increase the delivery ratio and decrease the overhead of basic contact epidemic routing protocol.