A decentralized approach towards location tracking of mobile users in opportunistic networks

Abstract

In existing models of opportunistic networks, nodes are not usually topology-aware. In this paper, we have developed a distributed mechanism in order to make each node in the network topology aware, i.e. aware of the approximate location-related GPS information of other nodes. The mechanism proposed in this paper is primarily developed on mobile agent based framework. It is assumed that each node has a dedicated satellite agent. Task of this agent is to help exchanging GPS information between its host node and its neighboring nodes only. This nearest neighbor interaction rule will eventually enable each node to have approximate location information about other nodes. As a direct consequence of topology-awareness, data forwarding schemes becomes far more efficient. We have introduced a parameter W (degree of disconnectedness) and show that our system is robust against wide variation of W. The performance evaluation results establish the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.