Complex Services Offloading in Opportunistic Networks.

Situation awareness is important to plan relief work in emergency response. However, impaired communication and computation infrastructure makes it difficult to acquire and analyze information. Accordingly, complex and resource-intensive information processing can be offloaded through opportunistic ad hoc contact to, e.g., first responder mobile devices, leveraging their idle resources. Ensuring complete service execution without overloading individual devices is a challenging task in such dynamic networks. In this work, we propose handover mechanisms that utilize the current context of individual mobile devices to balance load and achieve complete task execution without requiring a global view on the opportunistic network. We study their scalability and performance by combining them with our unified message template for distributed service processing in the OMNeT++ simulation environment. The evaluation shows that our handover mechanisms increase the success rate significantly and achieve distributed load balancing.