Group Aware Cooperative Routing for Opportunistic Networks Under Resource Constraints

Opportunistic networks are a new evolution of mobile ad hoc networks composed of intermittently connected nodes, in which the routing for the dynamic topology is a challenging issue. In opportunistic networks, the mobile nodes with common interest or close relationship may form into groups and move together, which brings them a good feature to employ when designing the routing protocol for opportunistic networks under resource constraints. The authors' main idea in this paper is to maximize the message delivery probability in a group-aware opportunistic network under the constraints of bandwidth and buffer space. Embedded this idea, they propose a cooperative routing protocol using the group feature, which includes the cooperative message transfer scheme and the buffer management strategy.