IICAR-Inheritance Inspired Context Aware Routing Protocol for opportunistic networks

Opportunistic network (OppNet) is a network of wirelessly connected nodes with an unstable network topology where the nodes transmit messages to each other opportunistically if they fall in the same communication range. They face various challenges with respect to stable connections, high message delivery ratio, fast delivery of messages and many more aspects. The prime reason for such challenges is that the nodes are oblivious of the network topology and there never exists an end to end path between the source and the destination. Despite these issues, opportunistic networks promise to provide a highly connected world in the coming future and therefore, intense research is going on to develop efficient routing protocols for the same. In this paper, a generalized context aware routing method named as Inheritance Inspired Context Aware Routing Protocol (IICAR) based on Mendel’s Laws of Inheritance is proposed. The protocol utilizes the context information stored by the nodes and takes intelligent decisions by predicting the path a message may take. The simulation results obtained for IICAR protocol reflects that the proposed protocol provides high message delivery ratio along with less consumption of network resources when compared to the Epidemic, Prophet, Hibop and HBPR routing protocols.