A utility-oriented routing algorithm for community based opportunistic networks

Opportunistic network as a representative network evolved from social networks and ad hoc networks, has been on cutting edges in recent years. Due to its inherent characteristics serving for intermittent networking setting specifically, the opportunistic network has been also widely applied in the domain of Internet of Things (IoT). Many researchers have focused on the realistic mobility model and cost-effective routing scheme. Community as one of the most inherent attributes of the opportunistic network has been proved to be much helpful in simulating mobility traces of human society and selecting suitable message forwarders. This paper proposes a community-structured mobility model with consideration of geographical location preference and time-variance in human behavior patterns. Based on this model, a novel routing algorithm is presented by jointly considering utilities generated by social degree and relation. The results show that our routing scheme is able to improve success rate while control the routing cost and transmission delay into a reasonable range.