The Strength of Vicinity Annexation in Opportunistic Networking

International audienceMost disruption-tolerant networking protocols available have focused on mere contact and intercontact characteristics to make forwarding decisions. We propose to relax such a simplistic approach and include multi-hop opportunities by annexing a node's vicinity to its network vision. We investigate how the vicinity of a node evolves through time and whether such information is useful when routing data. By analyzing a modified version of the pure WAIT forwarding strategy, we observe a clear tradeoff between routing performance and cost for monitoring the neighborhood. By observing a vicinity-aware WAIT strategy, we emphasize how the pure WAIT misses interesting end-to-end transmission opportunities through nearby nodes. Our analyses also suggest that limiting a node's neighborhood view to four hops is enough to improve forwarding efficiency while keeping control overhead low