Multiple Ferry Routing for the Opportunistic Networks

In order to overcome the phenomenon that the existence of end-to-end path is no longer guaranteed because of intermittent connection in the opportunistic network, it is desirable to employ a special node called ferry, which moves in a specific trace and forwards data for disconnected nodes, to provide communication opportunities. In this paper, Global Ferry Scheme (GFS), which exploits multiple local ferries and a global ferry to deliver messages, is proposed to minimize the average message delivery delay. The performance of GFS is evaluated and compared to the existing ferry-based routing method by analysis and simulation. The results show that GFS can improve the performance of opportunistic networks in terms of average delay and delivery ratio.