Design and analysis of context-aware forwarding protocols for opportunistic networks

Abstract

The new challenges presented by opportunistic networks call for advanced networking solutions, especially for what concerns message forwarding. Very promising are those approaches that exploit information on the context the users are surrounded by, like the other users they met, the places they visit, etc. In this work we describe HiBOp, a context-aware forwarding protocol that includes a mechanism for collecting and managing context information. We also present an analytical model that can be used as a framework for evaluating the delay under context-aware forwarding protocols in which context is built from pairs that characterize each user.