Opportunistic routing is a hotspot in areas of study regarding DTN routing and attracts the attention of numerous researchers. The most important issue in opportunistic routing is the selection of relay nodes. Due to nodes having stable social attributes and social relationships, taking the nodes’ social attributes into account when selecting relay nodes will result in better forwarding strategies. This study focuses on a new relay selection mechanism based on multiple social attributes in opportunistic routing, combining the energy consumption of nodes when forwarding data with the mobile features and nodes’ social attributes. This study uses QualNet to build two different simulation models for the opportunity routing algorithm based on multiple social attributes and traditional DTN routing protocols. By comparing the average number of hops, network throughput, message delivery latency and other key performance metrics in the two different environments, we find that the opportunity routing algorithm based on multiple social attributes performs better than traditional DTN routing protocols.

Key words: VANET, VDTN, routing protocol, cluster, cache management.
 

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