Innovative mutual information‐based weighting scheme in stateless opportunistic networks

Abstract

Recently, opportunistic networks (OppNets) are considered as one of the most attractive developments of mobile ad hoc networks that have emerged, thanks to the development of intelligent devices. Owing to the harsh and dynamic topology of these networks, attaining high delivery ratio is a challenging issue. Hence, it is imperative to select which node's attribute must be adjusted to achieve a higher performance in such unpredictable networks. A mutual information-based weighting scheme (MIWS) that exploits the entropy concept to assess the impact of the nodes' attributes on the network performance was proposed. The weighting procedure aims to figure out the correlative relations between different attributes and delivery ratio performance of the network. The high weight of certain attributes implies a correspondingly high impact in achieving efficient data forwarding. The proposed scheme is proofed conceptually and simulated using the Opportunistic Network Environment simulator. In contrast to previous studies conducted in the context of weight resolution, the proposed approach allows us to address this issue in real-time stateless non-social OppNets. Regardless of the deployed routing protocol, experiments show that adjusting nodes' attributes based on the proposed MIWS can improve the performance up to encouraging delivery ratios. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

A Dynamic Resource-Aware Routing Protocol in Resource-Constrained Opportunistic Networks

“…To this end, the proposed ReAR protocol offers an approach to dynamically regulate buffer consumption using the correlative relations between the buffer state and delivery ratio performance of the network as a basis for buffer management decisions. This is resolved by invoking our recently introduced mutual information-based weighting scheme (MIWS) [16] in the buffer management decision. The MIWS approach aims to estimate the correlation between network effectiveness and the attributes of the nodes in terms of delivery ratio.…”

“…where P y,v is the probability that Y = y and V buffer = v, and p y/v is the conditional probability that Y = y given that V buffer = v. Explanation and examples of the proposed weighting scheme are presented in Lenando et al [16]. In our work we use the estimated buffer weight to control the buffer consumption regulation by introducing the so called consumption factor, denoted by CF and is given by the following expression:…”

“…The impact of a node's attribute is quantified by a specific weight. In Lenando et al [16], we proposed the mutual informationbased weighting scheme (MIWS). The basic idea behind the MIWS approach is to assign each attribute a weight corresponding to the amount of mutual information between nodes' effectiveness and the attribute.…”