A Community Based Routing Algorithm for Mobile Opportunistic Networks

Opportunistic networking is a kind of delay-tolerant networking in which wireless mobile nodes communicate with each other without the support network infrastructure. Opportunistic networking uses locally available wireless technologies such as Bluetooth for pair-wise data forwarding hoping that the data will ultimately reach the destination. Intermittent connectivity and long delays in data delivery are inherent properties of this kind of opportunistic networking. The existence of communities among larger groups of people presents us with a use case for opportunistic networking where the content of interest could be shared opportunistically among the members of communities. In such communities, members are not just attached to a single community but are usually connected to several communities based on their interests. Forwarding and routing algorithms that route content of interest among these communities should focus on the interests of the members of communities and other inherent properties of opportunistic networking. Therefore a more efficient routing algorithm that can work well with the inherent properties in such a community set up is needed. In this work we propose, design and develop a community-based routing algorithm, named SWift routing algorithm (SW algorithm), that can be used to route messages among the community members in an opportunistic manner. Our simulation-based experimental results show that our proposed algorithm outperforms three well-known algorithms in the field under varying network conditions.