A Software-Defined Networking approach for congestion control in Opportunistic Networking

The short-term adoption of opportunistic networks (OppNet) depends on improving the current performance of this type of network. Software-Defined Networks (SDN) architecture is used by Internet applications with high resource demand. SDN technology improves network performance by programmatically managing the network configuration by using a control layer. In this paper, we propose that OppNet nodes use a control layer to get an overview of the whole network and use this knowledge to apply policies to get a better performance of the network. As a use case for our experimentation, we have focused on improving congestion control in OppNet with a control layer that dynamically regulates the replication degree used by forwarding algorithms. We have compared the performance of our proposal with two different configurations of the OppNet, over two community scenarios based on real mobility traces. The results of the test prove that our SDN-like approach overruns the other two approaches in terms of delivery ratio and latency time performance.