Efficient Listening and Sleeping Scheduling Mechanism Based on Self-Similarity for Duty Cycle Opportunistic Mobile Networks

In opportunistic mobile networks (OppNets), nodes should be in listening state to discover the neighbors for opportunistic message forwarding. While in OppNets, contacts between nodes are sparse, most of the node’s energy is consumed in idle listening state, which highlights the need for energy saving in contact probing. Duty cycle operation can be applied to address this problem. However, it may cause the degradation of network connectivity when the state of node is turned to be sleeping. In this paper, we propose an adaptive scheduling mechanism based on self-similarity, in which LMMSE predictor is used to predict the future contact information. The state of a node will be set as listening or sleeping adaptively according to the predicted result of future contacts with other nodes. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism by conducting a large amount of trace-driven simulations, which show that the proposed mechanism outperforms the random working mechanism and periodical working mechanism in terms of the number of effective contacts, delivery ratio, transmission delay and cost.