Intelligent epidemic routing for cooperative IEEE 802.11 networks

In densely populated areas IEEE 802.11 technologies are becoming ubiquitous in response to the increasing number of fixed access points and the multitudes of wireless smart phone users. The Intelligent Wireless Router (IWR) protocol is proposed for the fixed nodes (home wireless routers) of a cooperative IEEE 802.11 community network. Combined with a knowledge base, this protocol selects the best fixed node to initiate a spray-and-wait controlled epidemy among the mobile nodes (laptops and smart phones) that belong to the community. IWR's goal is to deliver delay-tolerant data messages from a particular source mobile node to another particular destination mobile node using the Internet as a backbone to control the network overhead, and consequently lowering overall energy consumption. Simulation results show that the IWR protocol can deliver the same number of messages of traditional epidemic routing causing less network overhead with a tolerable end-to-end delay.