Time Routing: A Community Based Routing Protocol for Opportunistic Networks

Opportunistic Networks are self-organized mobile ad hoc networks. In this situation, stable end-to-end paths can hardly exist for message delivering due to the mobility of nodes, the limited radio range, energy problems, low transporting speed and other features. Routing protocols for this situation need to solve the incurred delays, unpredictable routing hops, high drop rate, etc, so the store-carry-and-forward strategy is proposed. Here, we designed Time Routing (TR) on the basis of an overlapping community detection algorithm which was proposed in our previous work by analyzing the movement mode of people. TR can automatically divide the neighbor nodes into different sub-communities and choose more suitable nodes as candidate relays. By simulating with real trace data, it shows that the TR maintains lower delivery cost and keeps higher delivery ratio than other protocols.