From traditional to interesting: How Interests change the Routing decisions and Performance metrics in Opportunistic Networks

Abstract

This thesis presents all the work conducted in order to design and develop a new strategy for operating in Opportunistic Networks (OppNets), which allows efficient management of node resources by using the users' interest to route messages throughout the network. We present Interest-based Routing Protocol (IRP), that uses the users' interests in a topic to identify the destination of each message, adapting to real-time changes that may occur. Additionally, since IRP knows the interests of its neighbors in each opportunistic contact, the nodes that use this strategy build a perception of interest for each topic in the network. IRP uses this information to make forwarding decisions about messages only when and where there is interest in a topic, and to remove the less interesting messages from the network. In order to measure the performance in terms of message Delivery Ratio and Latency, we redefine these two metrics to support the user's changing interests. In both cases, they only take into account the periods where users are interested in receiving messages. Finally, we conduct several experiments to evaluate IRP, including two synthetic scenarios that use the real map of Barcelona and one scenario with the real contact traces of an academic course at MIT. In these scenarios, we run a set of simulations and compare IRP with an interest-based algorithm (Social-aware Content-based Opportunistic Routing Protocol (SCORP)) and the two opportunistic algorithms traditionally used (Epidemic (EP) and Spray & Wait (S&W)). In the experiments, IRP achieve better results in terms of Messages Delivered, Messages Relayed, Delivery Ratio, Network Overhead and Buffer Occupancy, while also showing the best Efficiency throughout the simulations.

Date of Award	29 Apr 2024
Original language	English
Supervisor	Adrian Sánchez Carmona (Director) & Ramon Marti Escale (Director)