Forwarding Factor with Acknowledgement Routing Protocol for Opportunistic IoT Network

Opportunistic Network is a subset of Delay Tolerant Network. Opportunistic IoT Network is the combination of Opportunistic Network and Internet of Things. They differ from mobile ad hoc networks where always require an end-to-end path between the source and the destination, while in the Opportunistic Network the nodes are mobile, and message may be exchanged through dynamic routes. Therefore, routing in opportunistic networks is way more difficult than traditional networks. In Opportunistic networks message routing is built based on connection between the nodes that influences according to their mobility, technique called Store-Carry-and-Forward and it forward messages to the neighbor nodes. For sending the message to the end node, the protocol moves the message to the intermediate nearest nodes. This paper proposes a Forwarding Factor with Acknowledgement routing protocol, which finds potential forwarders by keeping track of the interactions between nodes and thus controls the number of copies through the networks. Further, after successful delivery to the target node, it sends an acknowledgement to the source node using same technique. It was expected that the Forwarding Factor with Acknowledgement protocol outperformed the traditional protocols like Epidemic and Prophet with a fairly low communication overhead and more delivery ratio.