Space-Aware Spray and Transfer Routing Protocol for Opportunistic Networks

Opportunistic networks are novel selforganizing network models with the general characteristics of delay tolerant network. The main challenge for these environments is that conventional routing schemes cannot be adopted straightforwardly. In this paper, we propose a Space-aware spray and transfer routing (SSTR) that considers both the temporal and spatial information of the mobile nodes to help nodes to select more competent nodes for further forwarding the copies of packets. The proposed routing makes use of the location, moving speed, encountering interval and encountering duration of nodes to calculate the delivery predictability, and applies it to a novel spray and transfer strategy. Simulation results show that the proposed SSTR routing performs better than other routings, such as Spray and wait, Epidemic and ProPHET, in terms of the delivery rate, the average delay and the communication overhead, and it is wellsuited to the frequently disconnected dense opportunistic network.