Routing with (p-percent) partial flooding for opportunistic networks

Opportunistic networks are 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, the network topologies are dynamic and can rapidly change. In addition, communication under opportunistic networks can be erratic, thus routes between a source node and a destination node sometimes might not exist. These issues would make traditional routing approaches insufficient and unusable for opportunistic networks. In this paper, a new routing approach for opportunistic networks is proposed. The approach is called is p% partial flooding algorithm. With flooding, it is possible to reach a destination node with the minimum number of hops and minimum end-to-end delay. But, the major disadvantage of flooding is the excessive usage of the network resources. With p% partial flooding algorithm, the aim is to decrease the network traffic by randomly selecting neighbor nodes and routing traffic through them. This paper explains these two approaches (flooding and p% partial flooding) and compares their performance through various simulations. It is observed that p% partial flooding can result in the same benefits of flooding while decreasing the network traffic.