Effective forwarding scheme for opportunistic networks based on refined contact probability and betweenness centrality

When forwarding in opportunistic networks, the higher contact probability that the destination node has, the more likely it is to forward a message to the destination. Moreover, the higher the betweenness centrality that a node has, the more likely it is to act as a bridge node toward the destination in the network. Each of these two metrics is exploited in existing forwarding schemes. Nevertheless, these schemes suffer from high network traffic and fail to balance network traffic and transmission delay while maintaining a lower hop count. To resolve these problems, we propose a novel forwarding scheme that considers refined contact probability and betweenness centrality. In the proposed scheme, nodes with higher probabilities of contact with other nodes tend to gather together, while nodes with higher betweenness centralities compensate for intermittent connection disruptions among nodes in the network. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme outperforms most known forwarding schemes in balancing network traffic and transmission delay.