Abstract:
Opportunistic Mobile Networks (OMNs) are characterized by intermittent connectivity among nodes. In many scenarios, the
nodes attempt at local decision making based on greedy approaches, which can result in getting trapped at local optimum. Moreover,
for efficient routing, the nodes often collect and exchange a lot of information about others. To alleviate such issues, we present SeeR,
a simulated annealing-based routing protocol for OMNs. In SeeR, each message is associated with a cost function, which is evaluated
by considering its current hop-count and the average aggregated inter-contact time of the node. A node replicates a message to
another node, when the latter offers a lower cost. Otherwise, the message is replicated with decreasing probability. Moreover, SeeR
works based solely upon local observations. In particular, a node does not track information about other nodes, and, therefore, reduces
the risk of privacy leaks unlike many other protocols. We evaluated the performance of SeeR by considering several real-life traces
under plausible conditions. Experimental results show that, in the best case, SeeR can reduce the average message delivery latency by
about 58 percent, when compared to other popular routing protocols
