Hug: Human gathering point based routing for opportunistic networks

In this paper we study multi-copy routing schemes in opportunistic networks. Compared to single-copy protocols, the multi-copy schemes expedite the mean delivery delay while consuming more resources and exposing lower packet delivery ratio in resource-constrained system. To enhance the system capacity, most recent works explore the impact of social structure on network performance. Their results indicate that integrating the social relationship into opportunistic routing can greatly improve the performance metrics especially in term of packet delivery ratio. Considering this fact, we propose Hug, a “HUman Gathering point” assisted routing for delay-tolerant environments and evaluate it with the other two earlier presented Spray-wait and Epidemic routing protocols through simulations and theoretical analysis. Our results show that Hug achieves higher packet delivery ratio and lower communication overhead than Spray-wait and Epidemic routing while keeping a reasonable delay.