Energy-efficient forwarding mechanism for wireless opportunistic networks in emergency scenarios

During emergency situations, the use of mobile devices and wireless opportunistic networks as a solution of destroyed or overused communication networks are vital. In these cases, the fast and reliable delivery of emergency information, together with the use of energy-efficient communication mechanisms are required. In this paper we propose PropTTR and PropNTTR, a set of forwarding mechanisms for wireless opportunistic networks in emergency scenarios that provide a high message delivery ratio together with a low energy consumption. We have set up a testbed used to compare the performance and energy-efficiency of our proposals with two other significant forwarding methods. We present the results of this analysis comparison in terms of message delivery ratio, delivery cost, latency and energy consumption, showing the improvements of our proposals. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.