A social-aware routing protocol for opportunistic networks

This work proposes the Cultural Greedy Ant (CGrAnt) protocol to solve the problem of data delivery in opportunistic and intermittently connected networks referred to as Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs). CGrAnt is a hybrid Swarm Intelligence-based forwarding protocol designed to address the dynamic and complex environment of DTNs. CGrAnt is based on: (1) Cultural Algorithms (CA) and Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and (2) operational metrics that characterize the opportunistic social connectivity between wireless users. The most promising message forwarders are selected via a greedy transition rule based on local and global information captured from the DTN environment. Using simulations, we first analyze the influence of the ACO operators and CA knowledge on the CGrAnt performance. We then compare the performance of CGrAnt with the PROPHET and Epidemic protocols under varying networking parameters. The results show that CGrAnt achieves the highest delivery ratio (gains of 99.12% compared with PROPHET and 40.21% compared with Epidemic) and the lowest message replication (63.60% lower than PROPHET and 60.84% lower than Epidemic).