Copyright © 2012 Daru Pan et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Due to the features of long connection delays, frequent network partitions, and topology unsteadiness, the design of opportunistic networks faces the challenge of how to effectively deliver data based only on occasional encountering of nodes, where the conventional routing schemes do not work properly. This paper proposes a hybrid probability choice routing protocol with buffer management for opportunistic networks. A delivery probability function is set up based on continuous encounter duration time, which is used for selecting a better node to relay packets. By combining the buffer management utility and the delivery probability, a total utility is used to decide whether the packet should be kept in the buffer or be directly transmitted to the encountering node. Simulation results show that the proposed routing outperforms the existing one in terms of the delivery rate and the average delay.