Data Dissemination in Opportunistic Networks

Abstract

Opportunistic networks represent one of the most interesting evolution of traditional Mobile Ad Hoc NETworks (MANET). The typical MANET scenario comprises mobile users with their wireless-enabled mobile devices that cooperate in an ad hoc fashion to support communication without relying on any pre-existing networking infrastructure. Specifically, in MANETs the nodes of the network become active entities, and substitute to routers, switches, etc., in forwarding messages. Thus, messages are delivered following a multi-hop path over the nodes of the MANET itself. Despite the huge research activity that they have generated, MANETs were far from being widely adopted. The main drawback of MANETs was their lack of realism in research approach [17]. From a practical standpoint, real small-scale implementations have been long disregarded, and real users have not been involved in the MANET evaluation. From a research standpoint, MANET results were mined by excessively