Bloom-filter-aided redundancy elimination in opportunistic communications

Opportunistic communication is a promising solution to offload mobile data traffic by exchanging data among mobile devices without the aid of infrastructures. However, considerable redundant traffic can be transmitted in opportunistic communications. In this article, we introduce a protocol-independent redundancy elimination (RE) technique to reduce redundant data traffic at the packet level. Specifically, we propose a Bloom-filter-aided RE (BFRE) to further improve the performance of RE on opportunistic communication links. In BFRE, the receiver predicts the next consecutive data transmissions and delivers the compressed information to the sender by means of a Bloom filter. Then the sender can transmit small encoded packets, and the data traffic can be effectively reduced. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that BFRE can significantly reduce traffic and transmission time by 34 and 23 percent, respectively.