Forwarding redundancy in opportunistic mobile networks: Investigation, elimination and exploitation

Opportunistic mobile networks consist of mobile devices which are intermittently connected via short-range radios. Forwarding in such networks relies on selecting relays to carry and deliver data to destinations upon opportunistic contacts. Due to the intermittent network connectivity, relays in current forwarding schemes are selected separately in a distributed manner. The contact capabilities of relays hence may overlap when they contact the same nodes and cause forwarding redundancy. This redundancy reduces the efficiency of resource utilization in the network, and may impair the forwarding performance if being unconsciously ignored. In this paper, based on investigation results on the characteristics of forwarding redundancy in realistic mobile networks, we propose methods to eliminate unnecessary forwarding redundancy and ensure efficient utilization of network resources. We first develop techniques to eliminate forwarding redundancy with global network information, and then improve these techniques to be operable in a fully distributed manner with limited network information. We furthermore propose adaptive forwarding strategy to intentionally control the amount of forwarding redundancy and satisfy the required forwarding performance with minimum cost. Extensive trace-driven evaluations show that our schemes effectively enhance forwarding performance with much lower cost.