Specification and assessment of a fitness function for the creation of opportunistic networks

It is assumed that opportunistic networks are ad hoc, operator-governed, temporary, coordinated extensions of the infrastructure and have the ability to accommodate new FI-enabled applications. As a result, during the creation phase of an opportunistic network, the nodes that will constitute the network need to be selected and assigned with the proper spectrum and routing patterns. This paper focuses on the opportunistic network creation problem and particularly on the efficient selection of nodes to participate therein. This is achieved via the formulation of the node selection problem and the consideration of a fitness function which takes into account various attributes of nodes. Indicative results are also presented in order to obtain some proof of concept for the proposed solution. The provided result set includes an estimation of opportunistic network's expected lifetime according to simulation observations and an estimation of the delivery probability for a variable number of nodes.