Adaptive Fuzzy Spray and Wait: Efficient routing for Opportunistic Networks

The technological advancement in the area of wireless networking is ultimately envisioned to reach complete and seamless ubiquity, where virtually every point on earth will need to be covered by Internet access. Low connectivity environments have emerged as a major challenge, and accordingly Opportunistic Networks arose as a promising solution. While these networks do not assume the existence of a path from the source to the destination, they opportunistically utilize any available resource to maximize throughput. Routing protocols in such environments have always tried to target an increased delivery probability, a shorter delay, and a reduced overhead. In this work, we try to balance these apparently conflicting goals by introducing “Adaptive Fuzzy Spray and Wait”, an optimized routing scheme for opportunistic networks. On top of the overhead reduction, we argue that the spray-based opportunistic routing techniques can attain higher delivery probability through integrating the adequate buffer prioritization and dropping policies. Towards that purpose, we employ a fuzzy decision making scheme. We also tackle the limitations of the previous approaches by allowing a full-adaptation to the varying network parameters. Extensive simulations using the ONE (Opportunistic Network Environment) simulator [1] show the robustness and effectiveness of the algorithm under challenged network conditions.