A priority based message forwarding scheme for Opportunistic Networks

Opportunistic Networks (Oppnets) are the recent evolution of Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs), where an end to end path from the source to the destination does not exist, or exists for a very small amount of time. That is, the connections between the nodes are often intermittent, and the power of the nodes may go up or down. This paper aims at improving the forwarding strategy in the Epidemic routing protocol for Oppnets, which currently makes use of First in First Out (FIFO) strategy to forward the data packets. In this work, Priority Based Forwarding for Epidemic Routing (PBFER) is presented that forwards the packets based on the priority of messages. Through simulations the performance of PBFER is evaluated and compared with Epidemic routing protocol. It has been found out that PBFER performs better than the Epidemic protocol in terms of the number of high priority messages received, latency, delivery probability, overhead ratio, average hop count.