A Simple and Effective Long Duration Contact-Based Utility Metric for Mobile Opportunistic Networking

摘要

Mobile devices with Bluetooth or WiFi modules may form an infra-structure-less network, called mobile opportunistic network (MON), through their opportunistic contact with one another. The contact pattern between the mobile devices (or nodes) reflects the human users who carry them. Therefore end-to-end paths between the mobile devices in the network do not exist almost all the time. Messages must be carried by the mobile nodes and forwarded one hop at a time when two nodes are in contact. The sparseness of the contact patterns makes the data dissemination problem on MON a difficult one. In this paper, we identify the essential role of long-duration contacts and propose an effective routing scheme based on long-duration contacts. Our proposal involves minimal state maintenance overhead and is easy to implement. Extensive simulations are conducted in comparison to several approaches using real world mobile contact traces and the results support the effectiveness of our approach.