ROUTING WITH EFFICIENT BUFFER MANAGEMENT IN OPPORTUNISTIC NETWORKS

Abstract

Opportunistic networks or Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) are mobile networks in which a complete end-to-end path rarely exists at a time. Due to the high mobility of nodes, and limited radio transmission range, two nodes may not always be able to communicate with each other. Therefore, these networks are also called Intermittently Connected Networks (ICiVs). Thus, communication is plausible only at the encounter opportunities between nodes. This necessitates the use of slore-car,y-forward communication paradigm for routing messages from source to destination, in which intermediate mobile nodes store data to be transmitted till they find an appropriate relay node in the path towards the destination. The unavailability of any sort of global information to DTN nodes regarding the network, e.g., the topology, contact duration, etc. make relay selection an extremely challenging task. There are Li mainly two solutions adopted to overcome this challenge. The first solution is to predict the future contacts, but it may require a lot of information exchange between nodes and heavy computations which will drain the limited power in DTN nodes. The other way is to assume the existence of' oracles or availability of global knowledge, which limits the implementation of such schemes in real life scenarios. We propose a novel, simple yet efficient routing scheme, ROBIN, considering the constraints a - DTN has and utilizing the available information to effectively manage buffer and schedule messages. ROBIN is a combination of many mechanisms in order to make it more comprehensive Routing with Efficient Buffer Management in Opportunistic Networks f 2015 and efficient for routing. The buffer management scheme we propose for ROBIN, called B[N, is a routing independent scheme and can be integrated with any other routing scheme to manage buffers effectively. For the performance analysis, we carried out the simulations on the ONE simulator. For comparison, we implemented six other buffer management schemes. Simulation results show that BIN scheme achieves maximum performance among all of them. Simulations show that ROBIN achieves significantly lower cost and better delivery ratio as compared to some benchmark algorithms of DTN routing.