The Design And Implementation Of A Social-Based Hybrid Dissemination Strategy In Opportunistic Networks

Opportunistic network is a special class of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) in which connectivity between nodes is intermittent because of the high mobility of each node. Nodes in opportunistic network transmit data in store-carry-and-forward paradigm. Data dissemination usually processes in publish/subscribe model. Due to the particularity of opportunistic networks such as the extremely unstable topology, high latency, unpredictable encountering time of nodes and so on, there are still many challenges in the research of opportunistic dissemination strategies.Existing research has focused on Social-based dissemination strategy, which utilizes each node’s social property to build structured communities, and it can distinctly improve routing efficiency. While current Social-based dissemination strategy ignore the fact that nodes in the same community are geographically concentrated, and it’s a better way to treat some parts in the community with non-opportunity method.This paper is aimed to design a social-based dissemination strategy, which is based on the mature community structure. Moreover it will further improve data forwarding efficiency by detecting and making use of the stable enough nodes. This research first study some classic opportunistic routing protocols and analyzes there advantages and disadvantages in specific context. Then considering the actual social scene, a hybrid dissemination mechanism is proposed in this paper which depends on the phenomenon that nodes within community may always act as the nodes in MANETs. This solution maintains an Ad Hoc sub-network in communities and thus provides high reliability, while other parts communicate in opportunistic approach. To achieve the efficient data transmission, a community heads solution is devised to integrate subscriptions and schedule data transmission direction. Meanwhile, relationship between nodes and communities is used to select relays for forwarding delegation. In order to verify the functionality and performance, the design is tested in simulation platform. In the end, this paper researches the method to implement the strategy on experimental platform. After the study on existing opportunistic network platform, this paper gives out the frame and implementation details. Then a hierarchical network demo with this hybrid strategy is built to verify the correctness and efficiency of this paper’s design.