Congestion control in social opportunistic networks

In this paper a proactive congestion control scheme is proposed for social opportunistic networks. Congestion is an eminent problem as some nodes are better connected as compared to others and hence the load is unfairly distributed towards them. So, a threshold based packet forwarding scheme is proposed here. Multiple nodes are selected as the next hop for packet forwarding whose utility metric, computed on the basis of its social, delay, storage metrics and dropping probability of the packet, is greater than the current host by a predefined threshold. Simulations indicate that the proposed algorithm produces very good results in terms of delivery probability, overhead ratio and the number of packets dropped is also reduced.