SOCLEER: A Social-based Energy-Efficient Forwarding Protocol for Opportunistic Networks

Opportunistic networks are formed by self-organizing wireless nodes, in which data delivery is not guaranteed, due to intermittent end-to-end connectivity. In order to infer future contact opportunities, a large amount of information extracted from the context of users, such as its social behavior, associated to connectivity metrics have been used to design new forwarding protocols for opportunistic networks. Yet one open issue in this approach is the frequent usage of repeated nodes considered as the most likely to deliver the messages, thus funneling forwarded information towards certain routes containing such nodes overloading them and, therefore, causing a faster consumption of its battery resources. This paper presents SOCLEER, a social-based forwarding protocol which proposal is to relieve the constant demand for nodes considered most popular for forwarding messages in an opportunistic network. To this end, a performance evaluation was fulfilled and the SOCLEER protocol obtained better results than BUBBLE-Rap on forwarded messages load distribution, as well as a battery consumption reduction of preferred nodes when also compared to Epidemic and PROPHET protocols.