A fundamental traffic management strategy for mobile opportunistic network

Mobile opportunistic networks are characterized by intermittent connectivity and practically no end-to-end connection. In these kinds of network, network capacity and throughput largely depends packet replication. As a result buffer space tends to quickly deplete which may result in severe data loss due to packet drop. To the best of our knowledge, the two important phenomenon of traffic management viz., jitter and packet loss have evaded the minds of researchers in this field and hence we study the problem of buffer management and packet scheduling in such networks. We propose a fair queue scheduling policy where packets are sorted based on total waiting time, i.e. sum of waiting times over all the previous hops, before being transferred over a network link. We analytically prove that scheduling packet transmission as above reduces overall waiting time which leads to lower delay. We also propose a source initiated congestion aware buffer management scheme which helps in reducing number of packet loss significantly. The proposed scheduling and buffer management policy is simulated using real world (Cambridge iMote traces) datasets and compared with other existing scheduling policies. Results show that that proposed scheme has lower delay and lower packet drop compared to other scheduling schemes.