A multi-attribute routing protocol for opportunistic network environments

In opportunistic networks, nodes hold packets in permanent storage and make independent routing decisions on sporadically emerging links. This helps to achieve connectivity even if an end-to-end contemporaneous path does not exist between a pair of nodes. Next-hop decision is generally dependent on future probability of encounters with a destination node while other constraints on nodes' resources are ignored. We argue, in this paper that considering multiple parameters related to destination dependent and independent characteristics of a node, while determining its next-hop fitness, can help achieve better performance in resource-stringent opportunistic network environments. Our proposed routing protocol, MARS, not only gets itself cognizant of mobility patterns present within the network but also combines these mobility patterns with other stochastic information about nodes' characteristics. With the help of simulations, we show that MARS is able to achieve high delivery rates and comparable end-to-end latency with well-known routing protocols while maintaining its overhead to a significantly low limit.