An Adaptive Delay-Tolerant Routing Algorithm for Data Transmission in Opportunistic Social Networks

• Main Authors: Shupei Chen, Zhigang Chen, Jia Wu, Kanghuai Liu
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-11-01
• Series: Electronics
• Subjects: delay tolerant network; opportunistic social networks; routing algorithm; fuzzy inference system; delivery ratio; end-to-end delay
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9292/9/11/1915

In opportunistic networks, the requirement of QoS (quality of service) poses several major challenges to wireless mobile devices with limited cache and energy. This implies that energy and cache space are two significant cornerstones for the structure of a routing algorithm. However, most routing algorithms tackle the issue of limited network resources from the perspective of a deterministic approach, which lacks an adaptive data transmission mechanism. Meanwhile, these methods show a relatively low scalability because they are probably built up based on some special scenarios rather than general ones. To alleviate the problems, this paper proposes an adaptive delay-tolerant routing algorithm (DTCM) utilizing curve-trapezoid Mamdani fuzzy inference system (CMFI) for opportunistic social networks. DTCM evaluates both the remaining energy level and the remaining cache level of relay nodes (two-factor) in opportunistic networks and makes reasonable decisions on data transmission through CMFI. Different from the traditional fuzzy inference system, CMFI determines three levels of membership functions through the trichotomy law and evaluates the fuzzy mapping from two-factor fuzzy input to data transmission by curve-trapezoid membership functions. Our experimental results show that within the error interval of 0.05~0.1, DTCM improves delivery ratio by about 20% and decreases end-to-end delay by approximate 25% as compared with Epidemic, and the network overhead from DTCM is in the middle horizon.