Energy-Efficient Bonding Based Technique for Message Forwarding in Social Opportunistic Networks

In Social opportunistic networks where no end to end path exists between a sender and a destination node, the nodes usually perform message routing using the store-carry and forward pattern. Nodes consume a significant amount of energy during the node discovery phase and the message transmission phase. Therefore, it is challenging to design an energy-efficient message forwarding protocol. This paper improves an existing scheme named bonding based technique for message forwarding in social opportunistic network (BBFT) concerning energy consumption. The newly introduced energy-efficient BBFT approach proposes an energy estimation model that estimates the amount of energy consumed for transmitting, receiving, and scanning in the message forwarding process by the sender node. This energy consumption estimation model reduces the message flooding in the network, which results in conservation in the nodes’ residual energy, hence increasing the network’s lifetime. Simulation has been performed using ONE simulator to assess the EBBFT algorithm’s performance on energy parameters such as average residual energy, dead nodes, and other parameters overhead and dropped messages and compared against the BBFT and the energy-efficient SEIR protocols. On average, EBBFT is 90.65\(\%\) better than BBFT and 27.18\(\%\) better than SEIR concerning average residual energy while varying the message generation interval and had no dead nodes.