Sensors, Vol. 19, Pages 1876: Adaptive Routing Optimization Algorithm in Community-Oriented Opportunistic Networks for Mobile Health (Sensors)

The appearance of a large number of mobile intelligent devices boosts the fast rise of mobile health (mHealth) application. However, due to the sensitivity and complexity of medical data, an efficient and secure mobile communication mode is a very difficult and challenging task in mHealth. The Opportunistic Networks (OppNets) is self-organizing and can expand the communication capacity by the movement of nodes, so it has a good prospect in the application of mHealth. Unfortunately, due to the shortage of stable and reliable end-to-end links, the routing protocol in OppNets has usually lower performance and is unsafe. To address these issues, we propose an adaptive routing optimization algorithm in OppNets for mHealth. This routing scheme firstly analyzes the relationship between nodes and defines the average message forwarding delay as a new metric to selectively forward messages, and then designs a local community detection algorithm based on the metric to adapt to the characteristics of OppNets, and finally resorts to some super-nodes to ferry messages between different communication domains. The simulation results demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed scheme. It increases the delivery ratio by about 30%, decreases delay by about 35%, and decreases the number of forwarding by about 5%, by comparing it with several existing routing schemes. We believe that the relationship between nodes, community, and message ferrying will play an important role in routing of OppNets for mHealth.