Routing performance analysis of opportunistic networks with flooding and partial flooding methods

Opportunistic networks is one of the fast developing research areas in mobile communications. Under opportunistic networks, mobile nodes try to communicate with other nodes without any prior information and knowledge about the network topology. Furthermore, network topologies are dynamic and can rapidly change. In addition, communication under opportunistic networks is erratic, thus routes between a source node and a destination node sometimes might not exist. These issues would make classical routing approaches insufficient and unusable for opportunistic networks. In this paper, two routing approaches for opportunistic networks are proposed. The first approach is flooding. Under flooding, it is possible to reach a destination node with the minimum number of hops and minimum delay but with maximum network traffic. The second approach is selective flooding.The aim of selective flooding is to decrease network traffic by randomly selecting neighbor nodes and routing traffic through them. This paper explains these two approaches and compares their performance through various simulations.