A Proposed Scheme for Epidemic Routing with Active Curing for Opportunistic Networks

Opportunistic networking is emerging as a technique to exploit chance encounters among mobile nodes, and is distinct from previously studied behaviors found in sensor and ad hoc networking research. In this paper, we explore contributions in epidemic data dissemination and mobile ad hoc networks applicable to opportunistic networking, and propose an extension to prior work based on active cures. Our scheme, called SERAC, increases the rate at which cure messages are propagated in a fragmented network for the purpose of reducing the overhead of outstanding yet incompletely disseminated messages. Preliminary analyses demonstrate the feasibility of performance gains under the opportunistic networking model.