Implementation of Energy-efficient routing protocols for infrastructure-less opportunistic networks
In most computer networks, a path between a sending node and the destination node is required to transfer data. There are instances where such a path for communication may not exist, such as in space communications, and the standard message routing techniques will not work. Opportunistic Networks were developed to solve this problem. Infrastructure-less Opportunistic Networks (OppNets) are a type of Delay Tolerant Networks where nodes in the network are responsible for forwarding messages to the destination nodes under the constraints of intermittent connectivity, dynamic topology changes, and non-guarantee of an end-to-end path. Various routing protocols were developed for OppNets; however, these routing protocols are energy-inefficient, and this is a problem because devices used in OppNets are usually battery powered. In this project, new energy-efficient routing protocols for OppNets, namely, E FirstContactRouter, E WaveRouter, E FloatingContentRouter and E LifeRouter, were developed from their energy-inefficient base routing protocols, namely FirstContactRouter, WaveRouter, FloatingContentRouter and LifeRouter. The energy-efficient routing protocols were compared against their energy-inefficient base protocols and other developed energy-efficient routing protocols, namely E-Prophet, E-Epidemic, E-MaxProp and E-Spray&Wait routing protocols. The energy metrics that we used to do the tests were the number of dead nodes and the average remaining energy. Simulations were carried out using the Opportunistic Network Environment (ONE) simulator and it was discovered that the proposed energy-aware routing protocols outperform their non-energy-aware counterparts in terms of the above-mentioned performance metrics.