Efficient and reliable dissemination in wireless opportunistic networks by location extrapolation

Data dissemination is an important service in ad-hoc networks. This work presents a novel approach that utilizes the positioning information and the velocity vector of the immediate neighbors at every node to extrapolate the geographic location of the surrounding nodes at any time in order to obtain efficient dissemination trees with low control overhead. The paper includes an extensive simulation study that compares our approach to other representative overlay and probabilistic forwarding approaches. It is shown that our approach behaves similar or better than the other approaches, and is especially useful in the following challenging environments: the message sizes are large, the network is dense, and nodes are highly mobile. Therefore, we believe that this protocol is appropriate for opportunistic networks.