Probabilistic quota based adaptive routing in Opportunistic Networks

Routing in an Opportunistic Network (OppNet) is a challenging problem due to the absence of a complete end-to-end path from a source to a destination. Consequently, Opp-Net routing protocols use store and forward routing with multiple copies or replicas of a message in the network to achieve higher delivery ratios. Although flooding the network with many copies of a message improves the chances of message delivery, it causes higher network contention and latency. Quota based routing protocols deal with this problem by placing an upper bound on the number of replicas per message in the network. However, this resource saving solution is achieved at the cost of delivery performance. In this paper, we propose a novel quota based routing protocol, ProbRoute, which uses the network resources efficiently. Our simulation result shows that on the average ProbRoute achieves 10% to 25% higher delivery ratio than that of the existing quota based routing protocols.