Corpus for development of routing algorithms in opportunistic networks

Abstract

We have designed a collection of scenarios, a corpus, for its use in the study and development of routing algorithms for opportunistic networks. To obtain these scenarios, we have followed a methodology based on characterizing the space and choosing the best exemplary items in such a way that the corpus as a whole was representative of all possible scenarios. Until now, research in this area was using some sets of non-standard network traces that made it difficult to evaluate algorithms and perform fair comparisons between them. These developments were hard to assess in an objective way, and were prone to introduce unintentional biases that directly affected the quality of the research. Our contribution is more than a collection of scenarios; our corpus provides a fine collection of network behaviors that suit the development of routing algorithms, specifically in evaluating and comparing them. If the scientific community embraces this corpus, the community will have a global-agreed methodology where the validity of results would not be limited to specific scenarios or network conditions, thus avoiding self-produced evaluation setups, availability problems and selection bias, and saving time. New research in the area will be able to validate the routing algorithms already published. It will also be possible to identify the scenarios better suit specific purposes, and results will be easily verified. The corpus is available free to download and use.