A Dynamic Resource-Aware Routing Protocol in Resource-Constrained Opportunistic Networks

Recently, Opportunistic Networks (OppNets) are considered to be one of the most attractive developments of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks that have arisen thanks to the development of intelligent devices. OppNets are characterized by a rough and dynamic topology as well as unpredictable contacts and contact times. Data is forwarded and stored in intermediate nodes until the next opportunity occurs. Therefore, achieving a high delivery ratio in OppNets is a challenging issue. It is imperative that any routing protocol use network resources, as far as they are available, in order to achieve higher network performance. In this article, we introduce the Resource-Aware Routing (ReAR) protocol which dynamically controls the buffer usage with the aim of balancing the load in resource-constrained, stateless and non-social OppNets. The ReAR protocol invokes our recently introduced mutual information-based weighting approach to estimate the impact of the buffer size on the network performance and ultimately to regulate the buffer consumption in real time. The proposed routing protocol is proofed conceptually and simulated using the Opportunistic Network Environment simulator. Experiments show that the ReAR protocol outperforms a set of well-known routing protocols such as EBR, Epidemic MaxProp, energy-aware Spray and Wait and energy-aware PRoPHET in terms of message delivery ratio and overhead ratio.