An adaptive routing-forwarding control scheme based on an intelligent fuzzy decision-making system for opportunistic social networks

Routing selection in opportunistic social networks is a complex and challenging issue due to intermittent communication connections among mobile devices and dynamic network topologies. The structural characteristics of opportunistic social networks indicate that the social attributes of mobile nodes play a significant role on data dissemination. To this end, in this paper, we propose an adaptive routing-forwarding control scheme (FPRDM) based on an intelligent fuzzy decision-making system. On the foundation of the conception of fuzzy inference logic, two techniques are used in the proposed routing algorithm. Information fusion of social characteristics of message users and node identification are implemented based on the fuzzy recognition strategy, and the fuzzy decision-making mechanism is applied to control message replication and optimize data transmission. Simulation results demonstrate that, in the best case, the proposed scheme presents an average delivery ratio of 0.8, reduces the average end-to-end delay by nearly 45% as compared with the Epidemic routing protocol, and lowers the network overhead by about 75% as compared to the Spray and Wait routing algorithm.