Analyzing History Quality for Routing Purposes in Opportunistic Network Using Max-Flow

Abstract

Most of the existing opportunistic network routing protocols are based on some type of utility function that is directly or indirectly dependent on the past behavior of devices. The past behavior or history of a device is usually referred to as contacts that the device had in the past. Whatever may be the metric of history, most of these routing protocols work on the realistic premise that node mobility is not truly random. In contrast, there are several oracles based methods where such oracles assist these methods to gain access to information that is unrealistic in the real world. Although, such oracles are unrealistic, they can help to understand the nature and behavior of underlying networks. In this paper, we have analyzed the gap between these two extremes. We have performed max-flow computations on three different opportunistic networks and then compared the results by performing max-flow computations on history generated by the respective networks. We have found that the correctness of the history based prediction of history is dependent on the dense nature of the underlying network. Moreover, the history based prediction can deliver correct paths but cannot guarantee their absolute reliability.