An improved path management policy for the ferry in opportunistic networks

In the opportunistic networks, the connected path may be broken, and nodes may be partitioned into several disconnected subsets because of the movement of some nodes. In order to overcome this phenomenon, it makes use of a special node message ferry (MF) which is a typical mobility-assisted communication node, and moves in a specific trace and forwards data to provide communication opportunities. In this paper, we first consider the characteristics of nodes in the highly-partitioned wireless ad-hoc networks in order to find an efficient path for the ferry to deliver data. Then we propose an Improved Path Management Policy (IPMP) for the ferry to investigate the problem of controlling the ferry to visit nodes by different strategies. We analyze the principle and performance of the enhanced strategy IPMP algorithm which uses MF to forward packets according to the different data generation rate and location of nodes. We evaluate the performance via ONE simulation to confirm the enhanced approach is efficient in data delivery performance, compared to some practical algorithms.