An Association Rule Based PRoPHET (ARBP) Routing Protocol in An Opportunistic Network

An opportunistic network (OppNet) is a type of mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs), which demand end-to-end communication routes for message exchange. In contrast to MANETs, OppNet is an interconnected wireless network where nodes can be connected without having a predetermined or fixed path, rather this network uses the store-carry-and-forward approach to transmit a message from one node to the destined one through intermediate nodes. Several numbers of routing protocols are proposed to increase the performance and minimize the resource consumptions. In this paper, we have mainly focused on the improvement of traditional Probability Routing Protocol using History of Encounters and Transitivity (PRoPHET) which uses basically the history of transitivity and encounter. Here, we implement a new PRoPHET routing protocol based on the association rule mining technique of machine learning for better delivery, lower overhead, less number of dropped messages,and lower latency, which are desired for any successful communication between nodes. Our proposed approach uses the historical information of the prophet routing protocol and applies to them the association rules to find the best encountering node for good delivery of messages. Overall, our proposed ARBP routing protocol outperforms the existing PRoPHET routing with the consideration of the above mentioned performance metrics.