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Mobility as the main enabler of opportunistic data dissemination in urban scenarios

Abstract:

The use of opportunistic communications to disseminate common interest messages in an urban scenario have various applications, like sharing traffic status, advertising shop offers, spread alarms, and so on. In this paper, we evaluate the combined use of fixed and mobile nodes to establish an optimal urban opportunistic network aimed at the distribution of general interest data. Our results not only contradict current assumptions about the combination of fixed and mobile nodes, but also provide interesting general-purpose observations about the dynamics of opportunistic networks. First of all, we found that mobility is not the hindering and challenging property of these networks, but probably their main enabler. Moreover, we determined that if we want to increase the performance of opportunistic networks by increasing the node density, we should increase the number of mobile and not the fixed nodes since adding fixed nodes only increases the overhead. Finally, our evaluation approach goes beyond the state of the art and is based on using two different simulators, the ONE and OMNeT++, and two different mobility traces from cities with different structure.