Energy Efficient Forwarding Algorithm in Opportunistic Networks

In opportunistic networks, a successful message transmission between node pairs depends on the message size, the transmission speed and the connection duration time. This paper proposes a new message forwarding algorithm to improve the message delivery ratio and reduce the energy consumption. Previous encounter characteristics between nodes are used to estimate future connection duration time using a three point estimation method. Furthermore, the buffer utilization of nodes is used as a weight for the likelihoods to meet destinations according to the hop count of messages stored in the buffer. The simulation results show that the proposed forwarding algorithm achieves higher delivery ratio and less overhead ratio than the other four popular routing protocols. In addition, the proposed algorithm gains a better average residual energy performance among all the compared protocols.