NFCU: A New Friendship-based Routing with Buffer Management in Opportunistic Networks

Abstract

Routing in opportunistic networks is a very important and challenging problem because opportunistic network utilizes the contact opportunities of mobile nodes to achieve data communication.Social-based routing uses behavior of human beings which can form a community with the same interests to deliver the message.In this paper,we analyze the drawbacks of the original friendship-based algorithm, which defined social pressure metric to determine nodes'friendship community, but the metric couldn't distinguish the distribution characterization of the connection length which has an important impact on the selection of links with better quality. Further, the existing friendship-based routing doesn't consider the buffer management, which is vital for routing design in opportunistic networks. We propose a New Friendship-based routing with buffer management based on Copy Utility, named NFCU. NFCU algorithm, which not only considers the contact periods in constructing social pressure metric to solve the drawbacks of the original friendship-based routing scheme efficiently, but also considers the buffer management, that can efficiently determine which copy of the message should be deleted timely according to the copy utility function. Our proposed strategy can reduce the network overhead significantly, and increase the message delivery ratio. The extensive simulation results demonstrate that NFCU performs better than the original friendship-based routing. Moreover, we compare NFCU with other four classicalrouting schemes in opportunistic networks in terms of message delivery ratio, average delay, and comprehensive metric- message delivery ratio*(1/average delay). The simulation results show that our scheme NFCU can achieve better performance.