Abstract:

We propose an energy aware buffer management strategy, which can reduce energy consumption of nodes and balance the energy allocation among different nodes in opportunistic networks. Under the condition of a limited buffer size, the proposed strategy dynamically adjusts the buffer size of nodes where messages are stored and forwarded according to the energy level of their neighbors, thus decreasing the energy consumed during storing and forwarding processes. A new node state named inactive state is introduced to avoid the failure of message delivery caused by the sleep scheme in the traditional energy saving routing strategy. Simulation results show that the proposed strategy used in opportunistic networks can save more than 50% energy, and the standard deviation of residual energy among different nodes can decrease more than 80% in comparison with the traditional routing protocol with a sleep scheme.

Key words: opportunistic networks;energy consumption;buffer management;dynamic update