A Region Type-Based Data Dissemination Method for Mobile Opportunistic Networks

The nodes in Mobile Opportunistic Networks (MONs), such as the pocket switched networks composed of human-carried communication devices, are intermittently connected with each other. Due to the nodal movements and/or the unrestricted on/off switches of the communication devices, making the data dissemination in MONs a very challenging problem. To avoid the costly flooding of data packets, the data packets are usually disseminated by selecting one or multiple relays at the encounters between nodes. However, the mobility patterns of nodes will be different in various types of regions (such as residential regions, commercial regions or industrial regions), i.e., the regularity in movement directions and movement ranges of nodes is frequently varied since the nodes move between different types of regions. This issue has not been focused and investigated for the data dissemination in most existing works. To this end, in this paper we propose a Region Type based Data Dissemination Method (RTDDM) for MONs, which exploits the type correlations of regions, and select relays through a Markov decision method. To verify the performance of RTDDM, we give some theoretical analysis as well as an elaborated simulation study, the results of which show that the RTDDM improves the delivery ratio and reduces the delivery delay significantly.