Construction of Optimal Membership Functions for a Fuzzy Routing Scheme in Opportunistic Mobile Networks

This article proposes FRIMF, a fuzzy routing scheme for opportunistic mobile networks (OMNs). In FRIMF, we exploit the pairwise intercontact times to evaluate the connection strength between two nodes. Instead of assuming a random movement model, in the present case we consider node contact processes in OMNs as bursty events. Consequently, we introduce a burstiness parameter to characterize the variability in the dynamics of pairwise interactions. This variance metric, along with the statistical mean of pairwise intercontact times, is used to define a single FRIMF routing metric called closeness through a fuzzy inference system. This reflects the tie strength of the pair nodes. To improve the transmission environment, we further propose a method to develop optimal membership functions for the FRIMF’s fuzzy parameters based on the contact information. Particularly, we leverage the membership function elicitation techniques commonly used in collective opinion aggregations based on a direct rating process to establish the relevancy between vagueness estimates of the routing parameters and statistical distributions of the pairwise intercontact times in a way that eventually presents asymmetric triangular fuzzy numbers. In turn, these TFNs are used to properly define the fuzzy sets of the FRIMF’s parameters. Through simulations in the real human mobility environments, we show that FRIMF utilizing the enhanced asymmetric TFNs can outperform that using the typical symmetric TFNs developed based on our subjective preferences. Lastly, comparing with several algorithm benchmarks, we confirm the efficiency of FRIMF in transmission cost and delay.