ROUTING AND CONGESTION CONTROL IN OPPORTUNISTIC NETWORKS

Abstract

ABSTRACT Opportunistic networks are one of the most interesting evolutions of MANETs. Mobile nodes are enabled to communicate with each other in opportunistic networks even if there is no route to connect them. Also, nodes are not having knowledge about the network topology, which (instead) is necessary in MANET routing protocols. In this network routes are building dynamically, whenever messages are en route between the sender and the destination(s), and any potential node can be opportunistically used as the next hop, provided it is bringing the message nearer to the destination. These necessities make opportunistic networks a challenging and demanding research field. In this project, a new routing protocol named as Reduced Flooding Epidemic Protocol (RFEP) for infrastructure-less is proposed and is an existing Epidemic routing protocol improvement model. Its objective is to reduce the amount of flooding done in the Epidemic protocol. Therefore it reduces the resource consumption and network bandwidth and as well as power of nodes that helps in maximizing the network lifetime. Also a method for congestion control is proposed here for opportunistic networks. Congestion is an important problem in this network because some nodes having better connection comparing with other nodes and so the load is unfairly distributed towards them. Therefore, a threshold based packet forwarding scheme is proposed in this work to overcome this issue. Number of nodes is selected as the subsequent hop to forward the packets whose utility metric computed based on its social metrics, delay and packet dropping probability which is higher than the current host by the predefined threshold. The outcome shows that it generated very good results in terms of delivery probability, overhead ratio and reduced number of packets dropped.