A forwarding scheme based on swarm intelligence and percolation centrality in opportunistic networks

Incorporating social relationship properties into forwarding schemes in opportunistic networks has become a more and more important paradigm. Communication among the nodes in an opportunistic network relies on intermittent contacts without complete end-to-end paths. Most of these forwarding schemes take advantage of social information such as contact information and social relationship among the nodes in the network. In this paper, we propose a social information based forwarding scheme in opportunistic networks through mimicking honey bees’ behaviors in an artificial bee colony. In the proposed scheme, we adopt the percolation centrality in the social networks to assign certain nodes as “influential” bees. The proposed forwarding scheme is aim at balancing the level between network traffic and transmission delay using the home-cell community-based mobility model (HCMM). Experiments were performed on the network simulator NS-2. The results show that the proposed scheme has outstanding performance for the level of network traffic and transmission delay in comparison to other schemes such as Epidemic, PRoPHET and SimBet when using the HCMM.