Node Service Ability Aware Packet Forwarding Mechanism in Intermittently Connected Wireless Networks
Dapeng Wu, Puning Zhang, Honggang Wang, Chonggang Wang, Ruyan Wang · IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications · 2016
Intermittently connected wireless networks (ICWNs) have been studied in recent years to solve the disruption problem in mobile ad hoc networks and improve the utilization of temporary links raised by node movements. In ICWNs, the packet storing-carrying-forwarding principle is adopted through the cooperation between multiple nodes. Therefore, it is critical to include the connection status of nodes in designing efficient packet forwarding mechanism. In this paper, a node service ability aware packet forwarding mechanism is proposed based on the connection status. First, the connection model is established to analyze the transition of connection status; moreover, the service ability can be evaluated according to the connection strength and connection availability. Second, packet forwarding levels are determined based on their transmitting status to exploit the limited buffer resources. Consequently, the efficient packet forwarding mechanism can guarantee the flexibility of packet transmission in both complex and dynamic network scenarios. Numerical results show that about 20% delivery ratio increase can be achieved by the proposed mechanism, while the overheads and latency are reduced.