CRPO: Cognitive Routing Protocol for Opportunistic Networks

Opportunistic networks (OppNets) provide an infrastructure-less environment for delivering messages from source to destination. However, random nature of network topologies, unstable node connections and many other factors make routing of messages difficult. Transfer of a message from source to destination depends on the opportunity available to the carrier node for its encounter with the destination. Hence, an intelligent store-carry-forward paradigm needs to be defined which judicially transfers the message from source to the intermediate node till it reaches its destination. In this paper, a new routing protocol called Cognitive Routing Protocol for Opportunistic networks (CRPO) is proposed which makes intelligent decisions based on its past experiences and sensory inputs. It defines a neural network at each node and learns about the simulating environment with time for the successful delivery of messages. From simulation results, the authors observed that the proposed routing protocol outperforms traditional routing protocols such as Epidemic and PRoPHET, and an advanced routing protocol HBPR in terms of message delivery ratio, overhead ratio and number of messages getting dropped.