Energy-Efficient Encounter, Buffer and Contact Duration-Based Routing Protocol in Opportunistic Networks

Opportunistic network (OppNet) is a type of advanced wireless mobile network that has evolved from Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) and belongs to the category of Delay Tolerant Network (DTN). The unique features that make OppNet different from other wireless networks are its intermittent connectivity, unstable topology, no dedicated path to the destination from the source, and high node mobility. This further makes the process of data transmission a challenging task. For this a method called “store-carry-forward” is used in which the battery-operated intermediate nodes store the message, discover a suitable relay node, and forward the message to that node. This further leads to the depletion of the battery power or energy of the node in due course of time. In this context, there is a necessity to develop routing models by taking the current energy status of a node into consideration. In this paper, the authors proposed an energy-efficient version of a popular routing mechanism EBC, termed E-EBC where the selection of the next suitable node depends upon the battery power (referred to as Energy) of that node. This model is then compared with existing benchmark protocols- Epidemic, Prophet, EDR, E-Prophet, E-EDR, and EBC. Simulation results (using ONE Simulator) depict that the proposed model performs much better than that of the benchmark models respectively by around 42.73, 41.46, 58.19, 32.03, 65.99, and 44.77% in terms of average latency. The proposed protocol E-EBC is also compared against messages dropped by varying the TTL, Buffer Size, and number of nodes.