CROP: Community-relevance-based opportunistic routing in delay tolerant networks

Researchers have developed several social-based routing protocols for delay tolerant networks (DTNs) over the past few years. Two main routing metrics to support a social-based routing in DTNs are centrality and similarity metrics. These two metrics help packets decide how to travel through the network to achieve a low delay or low drop rate. This study presents a new routing scheme called Community-Relevance based OPportunistic routing (CROP). CROP uses a different message forwarding approach in DTNs by combining community structure with a new centrality metric called community relevance. One fundamental change in this approach is that community relevance values do not represent the importance of communities themselves. Instead, they are computed for each community-community relationship individually which means that the level of importance of one community varies depending on the packet´s destination community. This study compares CROP with other routing algorithms such as BubbleRap and SimBet. Simulation results show that CROP achieves an average delivery ratio improvement of at least 30% and can distribute packets more fairly within the network.