On‐demand data forwarding in mobile opportunistic networks: backbone‐based approach

Mobile opportunistic networks have been exploited for data forwarding and data offloading in many network scenarios, like the mobile edge networks, due to its low cost and high robustness. Existing data forwarding strategies exploit all available network resources to forward data in a ‘best‐effort’ manner. However, they ignore data's heterogeneous delay constraints and may ineffectively assign network resources, resulting in ineffective data forwarding. In this study, the authors improve the existing strategies by proposing a backbone‐based on‐demand data forwarding strategy, which assign network resources to data items on‐demand, according to their delay requirements. Specifically, they first propose an algorithm to extract a backbone structure in the network, where nodes in the backbone structure are responsible for the data forwarding in the whole network. Then, on‐demand data forwarding is formalised as an optimisation problem, which selects the minimum number of paths from the backbone to ensure data are delivered on time with high confidence. To address this problem, a path elimination process and a path selection algorithm are proposed to select highly‐independent paths according to the delay requirements of data. Evaluation results show that the proposed on‐demand strategy can significantly improve the performance of data forwarding in mobile opportunistic networks.