Evaluation of Opportunistic Routing Algorithms on Opportunistic Mobile Sensor Networks with Infrastructure Assistance

Recently the increasing number of sensors integrated in smartphones, especially the iPhone and Android phones, has motivated the development of routing algorithms for Opportunistic Mobile Sensor Networks (OppMSNs). Although there are many existing opportunistic routing algorithms, researchers still have an ambiguous understanding of how these schemes perform on OppMSNs with heterogeneous architecture, which comprises various kinds of devices. In this work, we investigate the performance of well-known routing algorithms in realistic scenarios. To this end, we propose a heterogeneous architecture including fixed infrastructure, mobile infrastructure, and mobile phones. The proposed architecture focuses on how to utilize the available, low cost short-range radios of mobile phones for data gathering and dissemination. We also propose new realistic mobility models and metrics. Selected routing protocols are simulated and evaluated with the proposed heterogeneous architecture, mobility models, and transmission interfaces under various constraints, such as limited buffer size and time-to-live (TTL). Results show that some protocols suffer long TTL, while others suffer short TTL. We further study the benefit of fixed infrastructure in network performance, and learn that most of the opportunistic routing algorithms cannot benefit from the advantage of fixed infrastructure since they are designed for mobile nodes. Finally, we show that heterogeneous architecture need heterogeneous routing algorithms, such as a combination of Epidemic, Spray and Wait, and context-based algorithms. Keywords-opportunistic sensor network; opportunistic routing; heterogeneous architecture; mobility model; smartphone.