A hybrid routing approach for opportunistic networks

With wireless networking technologies extending into the fabrics of our working and operating environments, proper handling of intermittent wireless connectivity and network disruptions is of significance. As the sheer number of potential opportunistic application continues to surge (i.e. wireless sensor networks, underwater sensor networks, pocket switched networks, transportation networks, and etc.), the design for an effective routing scheme that considers and accommodates the various intricate behaviors observed in an opportunistic network is of interest and remained desirable. While previous solutions use either replication or coding techniques to address the challenges in opportunistic networks, the tradeoff of these two techniques only make them ideal under certain network scenarios. In this paper, we propose a hybrid scheme, named H-EC, to deal with a wide variety of opportunistic network cases. H-EC is designed to fully combine the robustness of erasure coding based routing techniques, while preserving the performance advantages of replication techniques. We evaluate H-EC against other similar strategies in terms of delivery ratio and latency, and find that H-EC offers robustness in worst-case delay performance cases while achieving good performance in small delay performance cases. We also discuss the traffic overhead issues associated with H-EC as compared to other schemes, and present several strategies that can potentially alleviate the traffic overhead of H-EC schemes.