Congestion aware forwarding in delay tolerant and social opportunistic networks

We propose an approach for opportunistic forwarding that supports optimization of multipoint high volume data flow transfer while maintaining high buffer availability and low delays. This paper explores a number of social, buffer and delay heuristics to offload the traffic from congested parts of the network and spread it over less congested parts of the network in order to keep low delays, high success ratios and high availability of nodes. We conduct an extensive set of experiments for assessing the performance of four newly proposed heuristics and compare them with Epidemic, Prophet, Spay and Wait and Spay and Focus protocols over real connectivity driven traces (RollerNet) and with a realistic publish subscribe filecasting application. We look into success ratio of answered queries, download times (delays) and availability of buffer across eight protocols for varying congestion levels in the face of increasing number of publishers and topic popularity. We show that all of our combined metrics perform better than Epidemic protocol, Prophet, Spray and Wait, Spray and Focus and our previous prototype across all the assessed criteria.