Ad Hoc Networks 10 (2012) 1557–1569

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Ad Hoc Networks
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/adhoc

Context information prediction for social-based routing

in opportunistic networks
Hoang Anh Nguyen ⇑, Silvia Giordano
NetLab/ISIN-DTI, University of Applied Science (SUPSI), Galleria 2, 6928 Manno, Switzerland

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Context information can be used to streamline routing decisions in opportunistic networks.
Available online 31 May 2011 We propose a novel social context-based routing scheme that considers both the spatial
and the temporal dimensions of the activity of mobile nodes to predict the mobility pat-
Keywords: terns of nodes based on the BackPropagation Neural Networks model.
Opportunistic networks Ó 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Routing algorithms
Social context-based
Context information
Encounter probability

1. Introduction carriers, and information about such carriers can be effi-

The fast development of new and cheap wireless
networking devices has created great opportunities for net-
work communication in new situations. With wireless
technologies, such as IEEE 802.11, WiMAX, Bluetooth, and
other short range radio solutions (sensor devices), devices
equipped with wireless networking capabilities are perva-
sively used in daily life. The ubiquity of these networked
devices can facilitate communication even in the worst sit-
uations where there is no networking infrastructure, such
as in earthquake or tsunami areas. Mobile devices can form
network clouds, connected by wireless link as in Mobile Ad
hoc Networks (MANETs). Opportunistic networks (Opp-
Nets) further enhance this vision by considering character-
istics of mobile networking such as node mobility,
disconnections and partitions as features of the network.
Nodes in OppNets exploit the communication opportuni-
ties derived from mobility, but are likely to have diverse
mobility patterns which is a major design challenge.
The routing performance improves when knowledge
regarding the expected topology, the behavior of device
⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +41 79 676 52 84.
E-mail addresses: hoang.nguyen@supsi.ch (H.A. Nguyen), silvia.gior-
dano@supsi.ch (S. Giordano).
ciently exploited: that is, the context information of the
networks. Context information can be defined as (any)
information that can be used to achieve efficient and effec-
tive routing algorithms. They can be workplace, home ad-
dress, profession, email address, the mobility patterns of
nodes, the encounter history, the communities that the
nodes belong to, etc. Any information that helps making
decisions to forward messages is considered context infor-
mation. In literature, context-based forwarding has been
deeply investigated [1,2]. However, in the existing work,
the spatial and temporal aspects of context information
are not yet significantly taken into account, as discussed
in the next section. Exploiting temporal and spatial context
information allows both a better resource usage and higher
success ratio, as well as avoiding useless transmission
when the probability of reaching the destination is very
low. For example, if a student has a message to send to
her classmate, she knows that she will have a high proba-
bility to meet the receiver during school time and at the
school. Therefore, she keeps the message and waits for
the right time and the right place to send the message. In
other words, the use of temporal and spatial context infor-
mation permits the prediction of future context for more
efficient forwarding within OppNets. However, given the
characteristics of OppNets, this prediction can be complex.

1570-8705/$ - see front matter Ó 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.adhoc.2011.05.007
1558 H.A. Nguyen, S. Giordano / Ad Hoc Networks 10 (2012) 1557–1569
In this paper, we propose a social context-based routing
scheme, called Context Information Prediction for Routing
in OppNets (CiPRO), in which a BackPropagation Neural
Network (BNN) model is used to predict the context of
nodes, so that the source device knows when and where
to start the routing process to maximize the transmission
delay and minimize the network overhead.
The structure of this document is as follows: Section 2
presents the recent research on routing in OppNets. The
main contribution comes in Section 3 where we present
our proposal (CiPRO). In Section 4, we evaluate the perfor-
mance of our solution and with simulation results, we
show that it outperforms other solutions. Conclusions
and future work are presented in Section 5.
2. Recent research on routing in OppNets
A routing scheme for OppNets has to ensure some reli-
ability (ideally with full reliability) even when the network
connectivity is intermittent or when an end-to-end path
might be nonexistent. Moreover, in an opportunistic net-
work, nodes can arbitrarily have new contacts (neighbors)
without prior information, meaning that traditional rout-
ing approaches cannot be applied.
In this section, we provide a brief description of the pri-
mary routing approaches in OppNets available in the liter-
ature, from naïve to intelligent approaches. Specifically, we
emphasize the role of context information as well as social
aspects in routing. Based on the context information
exploited, we classify routing in OppNets into three clas-
ses: context-oblivious, mobility-based and social context-
aware protocols [3,4].
2.1. Context-oblivious routing techniques
The routing techniques in the context-oblivious routing
group use flooding-based techniques to route data, from‘‘-
blind’’ flooding to controlled flooding solutions. In the
flooding-based techniques, a sender sends out a request
packet on all outgoing links. Each node receives a request
packet and forwards the packet again on all outgoing links
except the one corresponding to the incoming link on
which the packet arrived. Each request packet may reach
the destination along a different route at a different time.
The advantage of flooding-based routing is its simplicity
in finding a route, in particular, it has the best performance
in terms of end-to-end transmission delay. However, flood-
ing causes a huge number of request packets in control
channels, which can result in network congestion. Further
examples of context-oblivious routing techniques are Epi-
demic routing [5] and network coding based routing
schemes [6].
2.2. Mobility-based routing techniques
Routing protocols in the mobility-based category ex-
ploit the mobility information of nodes to make forwarding
decisions. Node mobility impacts the effectiveness of rout-
ing in opportunistic networks, and Grossglauser and David
[7] proved that it increases the performance of ad hoc net-
works, especially in the routing of messages. The Probabi-
listic Routing scheme – PRoPHET [8] calculates the delivery
predictability from a node to a particular destination node
based on the observed contact history. The delivery pre-
dictability is the probability of a node encountering a cer-
tain destination. It increases when the node frequently
meets the destination and decreases (according to an aging
function) on the contrary. The context information in Bub-
ble Rap [9] is the social communities that nodes belong to.
Communities are automatically defined and labeled based
on the patterns of contacts between nodes. When a node
wants to send a message to an other node, it looks for
nodes belonging to the same community as the destina-
tion. If such nodes are not found, it forwards the message
to increasingly sociable nodes, which have better chance
of getting in touch with the community of the destination.
CAR-Adaptive Routing for Intermittently Connected Mobile
Ad hoc Networks [2,10] uses Kalman filters to combine and
evaluate the multiple dimensions of the context in order to
take routing decisions. The context is made of measure-
ments that nodes perform periodically, which can be re-
lated to connectivity, but not necessarily. We can also
cite here some other approaches that fall in this category:
Meeting and Visits (MV) [11], MaxProp [12], and Moby-
Space [13], etc.
2.3. Social context-based routing protocols
The main difference between social context-based pro-
tocols and mobility-based protocols is that the context
information in the mobility-based protocols is about the
mobility patterns of the nodes, the information about the
devices themselves, or the encounter history between
nodes. Whereas social context-aware protocols do not only
exploit such kinds of context information as in the mobil-
ity-based protocols, but also take into account the social
aspect of the nodes as an important parameter to route
the messages. This is motivated from the fact that in most
of the cases, the mobility of nodes is decided by the carriers
(e.g. humans, animals, and vehicles). Hence, the social rela-
tionship of the carriers plays an important role in how they
encounter each other. The advantage of this approach is
that it is more general than mobility-based approaches. In-
deed, these routing protocols can be used with any set of
context information, and thus they can be easily custom-
ized to best suit the particular environment. To the best
of our knowledge, there are two protocols that fall in this
category: Propicman [1] and HiBOp [14].
The main idea of HiBOp forwarding is looking for nodes
that show an increasing match with the known context
attributes of the destination. A high match means a high
similarity between node’s and destination’s contexts and,
therefore, a high probability for the node to bring the mes-
sage in the destination’s community (possibly, to the des-
tination). One of the main drawbacks of HiBOp is about
its high overhead to the network. Nodes periodically
broadcast and exchange their context information. Conse-
quently, the overhead will increase depending on the den-
sity of the nodes.
Our previous contribution Propicman [1] is one of the
first Social-context based routing techniques and allows
 H.A. Nguyen, S. Giordano / Ad Hoc Networks 10 (2012) 1557–1569
even for routing with zero knowledge. Nodes do not have
to exchange their information for routing purpose. Unlike
Epidemic, the same as the routing techniques mentioned
in Section 2.2, in Propicman, the message content is only
forwarded to the neighbor that has the highest probability
to deliver the message to the destination. Therefore, it
eliminates the drawbacks of flooding-based techniques,
such as high resource utilization, and network bandwidth
eating. Moreover, in Propicman, the authors also proposed
a technique to hide the information about the destination
that is used to select the best neighbor(s) to forward the
message. The privacy of the destination, so far, is not con-
sidered sufficiently in the recent approaches.
Beside the strong points of Propicman, there is still
room for improvement. In fact, these routing algorithms
only partially use the spatial and temporal aspects when
routing messages. For example, nodes still route data even
there is no or very few neighbors that have a high encoun-
ter probability with the destination (for instance, during
the night). As a result, the senders still execute the routing
process even if the chance of reaching the destination is
very low.
In the proposed routing scheme – CiPRO, we consider
also the temporal and spatial aspects of context informa-
tion and uses BackPropagation Neural Network model to
predict the encounter probability between the sender
and the destination. Thus, CiPRO provides the sender with
knowledge of when and where it can have a high probabil-
ity to successfully delivery the message to the destination.
3. Context information prediction for social-based
routing technique in OppNets – CiPRO
3.1. Motivation
We observe that the activity patterns of devices (nodes)
are likely to be repeated. For example, in a normal day,
people wake up in the morning, have breakfast, go to
work/school/. . . . During a certain period of the day, they
meet some sets of persons. Obviously, the number of con-
tacts are different by periods. So that if nodes can foresee
in which period of the day they will be very likely to meet
a certain destination, or meet nodes that have a high prob-
ability to encounter the destination in the future, they will
initiate the routing process. Otherwise, in low probability
periods, such as night time, they do not perform the rout-
ing process.
The published context-based routing solutions in Opp-
Nets do not significantly consider the spatial and temporal
aspects, they either exploit the frequency of contacts with
the destination (Prophet), or exploit the frequency of visit-
ing some pre-known places during a day such as in [15].
Additionally, they do not use social information of
node’carriers to exploit their possible contacts during a
day. The sender – the node holding the message and trying
to choose the best neighbor(s) to forward the message to
the destination - always routes the message in the same
way, regardless of the spatial and temporal context. For
example, when the sender has a message to send to a des-
tination, it sends the control message to its neighbors (as in
1559
Propicman [1]), or sends the control packets (the summary
vectors) to all the neighbors (as in ProPHET [8]) to compute
the encounter probability between the neighbors and the
destination, even though at this time there are no nodes
around (for example, during the night). In this situation,
if the sender still routes the message, it will have very
low probability (even zero) to successfully deliver the mes-
sage to the destination.
We also observe that most people have some frequent
contacts and other occasional contacts in their social rela-
tionships. The occasional contact persons are the people
that they rarely contact with, whereas they meet the fre-
quent contact persons very regularly, can be once per
day, every hour, or once per week, etc. depending on the
application. For their frequent contact people, they may
have some knowledge of these individuals’ periodic behav-
ior. Therefore, if the destination is a frequent contact per-
son of the sender, the sender may know in which period
it probably meets the destination or meets the nodes that
have a high probability to encounter the destination in
the future, thus it can have a good routing strategy to en-
sure the delivery. In other words, the sender has some idea
when and where to send out messages in order to maxi-
mize the delivery probability to the destination. Therefore
we distinguish, in the social relationships of a node, two
classes of persons:
 Frequent contact persons: the persons that the node
often meets.
 Occasional contact persons: the other persons.
So when the sender has a message to send to a destina-
tion, if the destination is a frequent contact of the sender,
the sender uses CiPRO to route the message, otherwise, it
uses Propicman because the sender does not have any
prior knowledge of the periodic behavior of the destination
(see Fig. 1).
In the next sections, we will present the assumptions,
some main concepts and definitions that will be used in
our routing techniques.
3.2. Assumptions
In order to evaluate the meeting probability between
two nodes, an important assumption that will be used
through the whole work: if two nodes have the similar node
profiles, they will have the very high probability to meet each
Fig. 1. Routing strategy.
1560 H.A. Nguyen, S. Giordano / Ad Hoc Networks 10 (2012) 1557–1569

other [16–18]. It is worth to recall that in our work, we con- Table 1

centrate and exploit the social aspect of the device carriers Node profile.

to route messages. So when we write node profiles, it refers Evidence name (e) Value (v) Hashed values
to the profile of the device carriers. ei vi H(ei, vi)
This assumption seems to be intuitive as, for example, if
two nodes work at the same workplace, speak the same
language, having the same habits (practice same kind of
Table 2
sport), participating in the same projects, etc. will have An example of a node profile.
very high probability to meet each other during the day.
However, proving it is out of the scope of this paper. Evidence name (e) Value (v) Hashed values

Rather, it is matter of ongoing experimental work (see Name Alessandro H(Name, Alessandro)
Section 5). Nationality Italy H(Nationality, Italy)
Profession IT researcher H(Profession, IT researcher)
Workplace Cambridge H(Workplace, Cambridge)
3.3. Concepts and definitions in social context-based routing Residence place Luton H(Residence place, Luton)

As mentioned in Section 2 and 3.1, the published rout-

ing algorithms only partially use the spatial and temporal
aspects while routing messages. As a result, the senders
still execute the routing process even while it has very lit-
tle chance, or less probability to reach the destination. Our
proposed routing scheme – CiPRO is built on top of Propic-
man [1], and takes all the advantages of Propicman, such as
routing with zero knowledge, and no information ex-
change among neighbors. Moreover, CiPRO takes into ac-
count the spatial and temporal aspects and uses
BackPropagation Neural Network model to predict the
delivery success of a message.
As CiPRO is built on top of Propicman, it is worth to
briefly look back to some concepts and definitions used
in Propicman:
3.3.1. Weighting the context information
One of the most innovative points of our social context-
based routing approaches in comparison with the other
context-based routing techniques is that we identify the
importance of context information. For example, if an Ital-
ian man travels to a city, in the evening, he goes out and
wants to meet people. He would prefer to meet people,
who speak Italian, love eating pizza, and especially these
persons must be football lovers. In this case, these criteria
must be in different importance priorities, and thus can be
presented in different ways by using weights.
In our social context-based routing approaches, we call
these criteria evidences and each evidence is assigned a
weight. Assigning a weight to an evidence is application
dependent and we will go in details on how to use it in
Section 3.3.3 and 3.3.4.
3.3.2. Node profile
In the network, each node has a node profile that con-
tains the node information, such as the information about
the device holder (name, residence address, workplace,
nationality, hobbies, etc.), information about the device
status, such as battery level, and memory capacity. The
node profile is composed by the set of evidence/value pairs
and the hashed values of these pairs as shown in Table 1.
An example of a node profile is shown in Table 2. The pro-
file structures are the same for every node. More specifi-
cally, the node profiles are composed by the same set of
evidences and these evidences are in the same order. The
only difference can be the values of the evidences. Every
hashed value of evidence/value pairs in a node profile
has the same length of 32 bytes. The reason for having
the hashed values is presented in the next section
(Section 3.3.3).
3.3.3. Encounter probability between a node (N) and a
destination (D)  p[N, D]
Each node has a node profile that is composed by evi-
dence/value pairs. The encounter probability p[N, D] be-
tween node N and destination D is computed by
matching the profile of node N with the profile of destina-
tion D. The matching between the two profiles is done by
comparing the hashed value of each evidence/value pair
in the profile of N as shown in Table 1 with the hashed val-
ues of the evidence/value pairs in the destination profile. It
is worth recalling that the outputs of the hash function al-
ways have a fixed size length and that the hashed values
are compared in order.
To classify which evidence is important to successfully
deliver the message to the destination, assume that each
evidence has a weight, let N ðE;VÞ be the set of the evi-
dence/value pairs in the profile of node N, DðE;VÞ is the set
of the evidence/value pairs in the profile of destination D.
The set of the matched evidence/value pairs between node
N and destination D is denoted by MðE;VÞ :
MðE;VÞ ¼ N ðE;VÞ \ DðE;VÞ :
If W is the set of the weights wm of the evidences in
MðE;VÞ ; W D is the set of the weights wd of the evidences in
DðE;VÞ . The encounter probability p[N, D] between node N
and destination D is computed as follows:
P
wm
p½N;D ¼ Pm2W : ð1Þ
d2W D wd
3.3.4. Encounter probability between a node and a destination
within period i  Pi
The encounter probability between node S and destina-
tion D within period i is the probability that S will encoun-
ter D within this period. Suppose that the set N i contains
the nodes that have the encounter probability to D higher
than the encounter probability of S to D (p[S, D]) and that
these nodes are encountered by S within period i. jN i j rep-
 H.A. Nguyen, S. Giordano / Ad Hoc Networks 10 (2012) 1557–1569 1561

resents the cardinality of N i , the encounter probability be- probability to send the message, but also some neighbors
tween S and D within period i is computed as follows: that have high delivery probabilities in the top-down order
P to forward the message content, and of course, these val-
A2Ni p½A; D
Pi ¼ ; ð2Þ ues must be higher than the encounter probability of S.
jNi j
with Pi is the encounter probability within period i, p[A, D] is 3.5. Routing if the destination is a frequent contact
the encounter probability between node A and the destina-
tion, computed as in Eq. (1). As mentioned above, the activities of device carriers are
different by periods of time, for example activities of peo-
ple during 24 hours of a day. In order to analyze the con-
3.4. Routing if the destination is an occasional contact
text information of a node, we divide its activities into
cycles and periods. Dividing the activities of people into cy-
If the destination is an occasional contact of the sender,
the sender does not have any history contact with the des- cles and periods is also used in our first work on the predic-
tion of context information in OppNets (SpatioTempo
tination. In this case, the sender uses Propicman to route
messages. Details are presented below. [19]). The notion of cycles and periods appeared by our
observation that during a normal day, the device carriers
Nodes in the network have node profiles that are com-
posed by evidence/value pairs and the hashed values of (typically people) probably repeat their activities day by
day. We can see that at each period, nodes probably meet
each pair. Each evidence is assigned a weight to classify
which evidence is important to successfully deliver the a similar set of the other nodes. So, in order to send data to
a destination, the source node uses the history encounter
message to the destination. Suppose that the sender S –
the node holding the message and trying to choose the best with the destination at each period to predict the
encounter probability with the destination in the next per-
neighbor(s) to forward the message M to the destination D
– knows some information about the profile of D. S builds iod. As a result, it can decide the frequency of broadcasting
the control packet and the message content in the next
the control message HM which is the concatenation of all
the hashed values of the evidence/value pairs in order period, thus it can minimize the message overhead and
also the resource utilization. Therefore, if the destination
(see Fig. 2). These evidences can have values if S knows
or can be empty in the opposite case. is a frequent contact person, the senders can predict when
it will have a high probability to meet the destination next
HM ¼ Cat ri¼1 ðHðei ; v i Þ; wi ; MS ; qS Þ; time, so prediction is used to find the best interval for
sending the message content in the coming periods.
where MS (MAC address of S) and qS (the sequence number
Obviously, there are always exceptional cases, such as
of M) are used to avoid duplicates, wi are the weights cor-
weekends or holidays. In these cases, they probably meet
responding to each evidence and are put in the same order
other sets of people.
as the corresponding evidences, r is the number of evi-
In the next section, we explain the prediction model
dence/value pairs that S may know in the profile of D. By
that we apply and the reason why we use this for our
putting the weights into the control message HM , the sen-
problem.
der can classify which evidence is important for the inter-
mediate nodes in order to maximize its probability of
3.5.1. Predicting next contacts: BackPropagation Neural
meeting the destination.
Network model
At first, S sends the control message HM to every neigh-
In order to foresee the contact situation of the sender in
bor, without including the message content. Each neighbor
the next period, we must rely on the contact history be-
(for instance, A), when receiving HM , compares each of its
tween the sender and other nodes. As the sender already
own hashed values of evidence/value pairs to the hashed
has some knowledge about the contact history with its fre-
values in HM , then computes its encounter probability
quent contact nodes, this knowledge can be used to predict
with D as in Section 3.3.3, Eq. (1). Then A broadcasts HM
the contact situation of the sender in the next period. We
to its neighbors (second hop of S through A). The second
choose the Neural-based BNN technique as the prediction
hop nodes continue to compute the encounter probability
technique because of the following reasons [20,21]:
and send the result back to A. A chooses the node with
the highest encounter probability from two hop nodes
 Adaptive to the current environment, BNNs are flexible.
then sends back to S. Thus, for each control message sent
The parameters (synaptic weights) are automatically
out, the sender S receives the delivery probabilities of its
adjusted after each training process to have a better
two hop neighbors. If the highest encounter probability re-
output accuracy.
ceived from two hop neighbors is higher than the encoun-
 It is straightforward to implement.
ter probability of S, S will forward the message content M
 It is application-independent.
to this neighbor. To ensure the message delivery, S can se-
lect not only the neighbor that has the highest encounter
BackPropagation technique: A neural network has to
be configured such that the application of a set of inputs
produces the desired output. Various methods to set the
strengths of the connections exist. One way is to set the
synaptic weights explicitly, using a priori knowledge. An-
Fig. 2. Control message structure. other way is to train the system by feeding it with samples,
1562 H.A. Nguyen, S. Giordano / Ad Hoc Networks 10 (2012) 1557–1569

consisting of input and output values (training samples)

and letting it change its synaptic weights according to
some learning rule. The first way is not suitable in our sit-
uation because of lacking a priori knowledge. The Back-
Propagation algorithm looks for the minimum of the
error function in the synaptic weight space using the
method of gradient descent.
The application of the training rule involves two phases:
during the first phase, the input is presented and propa-
gated forward through the network to compute the output
value for each unit. This output is then compared with the
targets, resulting in an error signal for each output unit.
The second phase involves a backward pass through the
network during which the error signal is passed to each
unit in the network and the appropriate synaptic weight
Fig. 3. A simple neural structure.
changes are made. This second, backward pass allows for
recursive computation of output value as indicated above.
For the sake of simplicity, which is important for re-
The first step is to compute the error signal for each of the
source-constrained devices, in the implementation we
output units. This is the difference between the predicted
cumulate the encounter probabilities P ji (j 2 [1, . . ., ,K]) to
and desired output.
compute the vertical input at the period i as in Eq. (3). As
When creating a functional model in CiPRO, there are
a result, after each cycle, the node contains only the latest
some basic components of importance. First, the inputs of
context value of each period.
the neuron are modeled as synaptic weights. The strength
of the connection between an input and a neuron is noted P1i þ Pc2i
by the value of the synaptic weight. The next two compo- Pc1i ¼ ; ð3Þ
2
nents model the actual activity within the neuron. An adder
sums up all the inputs modified by their respective synaptic where Pc2i is the cumulative value at period i of cycle 2, Pc1i
weights. Finally, an activation function controls the ampli- is the cumulative value at period i of cycle 1.
tude of the output (usually between 0 and 1). In order to predict the encounter probability with the
destination in the next period i, we build a simple form
3.5.2. Using BackPropagation model to predict the encounter of a neural network with BackPropagation algorithm as
probability with the destination within the next period Fig. 5. In the figure, the horizontal input, denoted by Ih is
In order to predict the contact situation of a device car- the current encounter probability, thus Ih ¼ P 0i1 ; the verti-
rier in the next period, we rely on two input parameters: cal input, denoted by Iv, is the cumulative values of
the history encounter of the device carrier in the current Pji ðj 2 ½1; . . . ; ; KÞ, thus Iv ¼ Pc1i and is computed as in Eq.
period (the horizontal input) and the history encounter (3). The corresponding synaptic weights of the vertical
of the carrier in the same periods as the next period of and horizontal inputs (the synaptic weights in Fig. 3) are
the previous cycles (the vertical input). Whenever the node wv, wh respectively.
has a message to send to a frequent contact, it will com-
pute the encounter probability with the destination at each  The summing junction function:
period. These values are stored at the node for the predic- m ¼ Iv wv þ Ih wh ; ð4Þ
tion in the next cycles. The history encounter (encounter
probability) between the node and the frequent contacts  The normalization function: As mentioned previously,
is computed cumulatively at the same period as the previ- the activation function acts as a normalization function,
ous cycles in the past as in Eq. (3). such that the output of the neuron is between certain
The prediction happens at each period, the output value values (0 and 1, in our case).
is then compared with the actual value and changes may m Iv wv þ Ih wh
be applied to have better prediction function in the next U¼ ¼ : ð5Þ
wv þ wh wv þ wh
period, such that the predicted result must be as close to
the actual result as possible.
The output of the activation function is the predicted
3.5.2.1. Predict the output value. Let us look at Fig. 4 where encounter probability with the destination within the next
Pij (j 2 [1, . . . ,K]), (i 2 [1, . . . ,C]) is the encounter probability period. Therefore, the predicted encounter probability Ppred
with the destination within the period i in cycle j, defined of the next period is as follows:
in Section 3.3.3. K is the number of previous cycles in the Iv wv þ Ih wh
past that we take into account to create the vertical input, Ppred ¼ : ð6Þ
wv þ wh
C is the number of periods in each cycle. Suppose that we
are in period (i  1) of the current cycle (cycle 0); the con-
text situation in this period is denoted by P 0i1 . We want to 3.5.2.2. Error function. In Neural Network, this function is
predict the context situation ðP0i Þ in the next period (period also called Mean Squared Error (MSE) between the actual
i, cycle 0). output and the desired output (in our case, it is predicted
 H.A. Nguyen, S. Giordano / Ad Hoc Networks 10 (2012) 1557–1569 1563

Fig. 4. Vertical and horizontal parameters.

The sender S uses two input parameters to predict P 0i :

the horizontal input P0i1 , denoted by Ih and the vertical in-
put, denoted by Iv, which is the cumulative encounter
probability
 of
 the same periods as i of the previous cycles
P ji ; j 2 ½1::K . To avoid containing too much data at the
sender, we use the vertical input as the cumulative
encounter probability as shown in Eq. (3).
At the beginning, S can be in one of the two states as
follows:

1. S has not yet passed any previous cycles yet (initial

Fig. 5. Prediction process with BackPropagation Neural Network model.
state), there is not a vertical input for the neural net-
work. We set this value equal to 0; the initial horizontal
synaptic weight is 0.5. Thus the predicted value is com-
output) for a given input in the training example (one per-
puted as follows:
iod). This is simply the average of the squares of the differ-
ence between what we predict and what we got. Thus, our Iv wv þ Ih wh
error function can be formally written as: Ppred ¼ ¼ Ih :
wv þ wh
ðPpred  Pactual Þ2
E¼ ; ð7Þ
2 The synaptic weight adjustment as computed in Eq.
(A.3) for the next prediction is:
where Ppred is the predicted value and Pactual is the actual 1
value of the period. Dwh ¼ cbi Ih ¼ cðPpred  P actual Þ Ih
wv þ wh
1
3.5.3. Routing process ¼ cðPpred  Pactual Þ Ih ¼ 2cIh ðIh  P actual Þ; ð8Þ
wh
Based on the predicted information, senders will have a
suitable decision on the number of broadcasts of the mes- 2. S has passed some previous cycles (in most of the
sage in this period. They can increase the number of broad- cases), we apply the computation for the prediction as
casts in the period that has high encounter probability in Eq. (5):
with the destination or they will not initiate the routing
m Iv wv þ Ih wh
process in the period that has very low rate. The definition Ppred ¼ ¼ :
wv þ wh wv þ wh
of the encounter probability within a period is presented in
Eq. (2) and how to predict it in Section 3.5.2, Eq. (6).
CiPRO concentrates on the spatial and temporal aspects After each period, the vertical and horizontal synaptic
of the devices. The sender uses the predicted encounter weights are adjusted as follows:
probability within the next period to decide how many wv ¼ wv old þ Dwv with Dwv ¼ cbi Iv ;
times to resend the message header in order to have the wh ¼ whold þ Dwh with Dwh ¼ cbi Ih ;
highest encounter probability with the destination without
1
flooding the network. where bi ¼ ðPpred  P actual Þ wv þw .
h

Assume that we are currently in the period (i  1), we

  Finally, after each prediction, changes can be made to
already knew the encounter probability P0i1 within this
the synaptic weights of the vertical and horizontal inputs
period, we want to predict P0i of the next period i. of the next prediction. Once the sender has the expected
1564 H.A. Nguyen, S. Giordano / Ad Hoc Networks 10 (2012) 1557–1569
encounter probability within the next period, it will decide
on the number of broadcasts of the message header in the
next period.
Given u the maximum broadcast capacity of S in the
period i, the number of broadcasts of the message header
in the period i will be a rounded value as follows:
y ¼ b/Ppred c; 0 < / 6 u:
In Eq. (9), the parameter / is flexible, depends on the con-
straints of nodes to the system. In other words, if the mes-
sage is important, and the network overhead is not a
problem, in this case, the communication delay is an
important parameter, the parameter / is set to maximum
(equal to u). Thus, after the prediction process, if the pre-
dicted encounter probability within the next period is high,
the sender must increase the number of broadcasts of the
message header to maximize the capacity of sending the
message to the intermediate nodes that have the high
encounter probability with the destination in the future.
Assuming U is the number of units of time in a period,
for the next period, the sender will broadcast the message
header in every bUyc ¼ b/PU c units. By predicting the con-
pred
text information in the next period, the sender can adap-
tively have a suitable routing strategy by deciding the
frequency of broadcasting the message headers in the next
period.
4. Simulation results and performance evaluation
4.1. Mobility model and simulation description
The simulation scenario is a rectangle of 1870 
1520 m, divided in a 2  6 grid. We simulate 50 nodes,
with the transmission range of 30 m. The mobility model
used in the simulation is the Community-based Mobility
Model [22]. Its main idea is to model nodal mobility based
on human social relationships and thus identify communi-
ties. The communities are then placed into the celled net-
work area, and each community occupies a cell. A node
moves randomly in its cell. When it is outside of its cell,
its moving decisions depend on the social attractiveness
(importance in terms of the social relationships). We
developed the simulator in Java based on the traces gener-
ated from CMM model.1
The simulation is executed based on some assumptions:
The nodes have unlimited power, no constraint about the
storage space, neither the memory space, if a node trans-
mits a message to another node, the message will be re-
ceived correctly (no data loss).
In our simulation, nodes move according to the traces
generated by this model, where we map the social commu-
nity notion with the grid in the simulation scenario and the
social attractiveness of a community (grid) to a node is the
time during a day the node stays in this grid. The simulated
duration is 14 cycles, one cycle corresponds to one day, and
periods to hours. The routing algorithm is evaluated until
the first copy of the message reached the destination. The
1
The simulation source code is available on http://www.people.usi.ch/
nguyenh/, the movement traces generator is available on http://www.cs.st-
andrews.ac.uk/mirco/software.html
weekend days are considered exceptions (behavior is dif-
ferent from the other days of the week).
At the beginning, each node randomly has 8 frequent
destinations. For the training process, both the vertical
and horizontal synaptic weights are 0.5, as well as the
learning rate. During the simulation, the messages were
sent out from arbitrary senders, 75% of them were sent
ð9Þ
to the frequent destinations of the sources. The simulation
results are the average results from 16 simulation runs
with the 95% confidence level.
At period i, if node S has message M to send to destina-
tion D, there are two cases:
1. D is one of the frequent contacts of S, S will predict the
encounter probability within the next period (i + 1).
2. D is not a frequent contact of S. In this case, S uses Pro-
picman to route the message.
Note that when there is a message to send to a destina-
tion, this message can go through some intermediate
nodes. Then each node uses its relationship with the desti-
nation to decide which routing technique will be em-
ployed: CiPRO in the case that the destination is one of
its frequent destinations, or Propicman in the opposite
case.
4.2. Evaluation of the contact prediction
Fig. 6 shows the percent error of the prediction. As
shown in the figure, the precision increases by cycles and
periods. During the first cycles (cycles 1–4), the node does
not have enough context information to predict the
encounter probability within the next period, and as a re-
sult, the predicted value and the desired value are very dif-
ferent. Thanks to the learning process with synaptic weight
adjustments and the impact of the learning rate after each
period, in time, period by period, cycle by cycle, these two
values come closer. This tendency is represented by the
decrement of the percent error shown in Fig. 6. Of course,
there are still some points that have quite big relative per-
centage value (cycle 9, for instance), this happens for the
exceptional cases. From cycle 4 onward, the percent error
index goes down, from around 20% down to around 7%. It
1
"percentError.data"
0.8
Normalized Error
0.6
0.4
0.2
0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
Cycles
Fig. 6. Percent Error of the prediction. Each cycle is one day.
 H.A. Nguyen, S. Giordano / Ad Hoc Networks 10 (2012) 1557–1569
is the result of the learning process, through periods to
periods, with the experience achieved after each learning
process, the synaptic weights are adjusted to have the pre-
dicted outputs as close as possible to the desired values.
Thus, after some cycles (cycle 5), the predicted result be-
comes more stable. The percent error goes down around
7%. This is an acceptable level if we consider the typical
characteristics of OppNets.
4.3. Impact factors and performance evaluation
In the performance evaluation, we compared CiPRO
with three representative routing protocols (context-obliv-
ious, mobility-based and social context-based routing pro-
tocols as mentioned in Section 2): Epidemic, ProPHET and
Propicman respectively. We ran all these routing solutions
in the same testbed with the same scenario to evaluate
their performance. We have focused on comparing their
performance with regard to the following metrics. First of
all, we are interested in the network overhead: how many
additional bytes are sent for successfully delivering a mes-
sage to a destination. Applications using OppNets should
be relatively delay tolerant, but it is still of interest to con-
sider the message delivery delay to know how long it takes
a message to be delivered.
Moreover, we vary the number of nodes and their selec-
tion for routing to see the impact on the performance of
the node density and of the number of selected candidates
at each neighbor selection. As in the simulation scenario,
the speed of nodes and the sending rate are randomly gen-
erated, we do not consider their impact on the perfor-
mance. During the evaluation, sometime we use the term
‘‘routing process’’. A routing process is started when a node
broadcast the control packet and is ended by finding the
next hop forwarder.
4.3.1. Impact of the number of selected candidates
In ProPHET, Propicman and CiPRO, a sender only sends
the message content to the neighbor(s) that have the high-
est encounter probability with the destination and this
probability must be higher than the encounter probability
of the sender. The number of nodes selected as forwarders
at each routing process impacts on the routing perfor-
mance. If more nodes are involved in the routing process,
more resources are used but the data delay can be lowered.
In order to evaluate the performance, we vary the number
of neighbors selected as forwarders at each routing pro-
cess, and compare the performance between our solution
CiPRO with the other ProPHET, Propicman and Epidemic.
Epidemic is chosen as the basic routing algorithm in the
comparison to see how much CiPRO, ProPHET and Propic-
man improve/cost with respect to a blind approach. So we
normalize the results of the three routing protocols
with the results of Epidemic, and we show that in Figs. 7
and 8. In the implementation, we run the simulation in
two scenarios:
 The sender only sends the message content to the
neighbor that has the highest encounter probability
with the destination and this value must be higher than
the encounter probability of the sender.
1565
 The sender selects up to 20% of the neighbors that have
high delivery probabilities in the descending order. And
of course, these values must be higher than the encoun-
ter probability of the sender.
Fig. 7 shows that flooding-based routing scheme (Epi-
demic) is very costly in terms of overhead in comparison
to the three routing algorithms. The figure shows that,
compared to Epidemic, CIPRO gains two orders of magni-
tude in terms of overhead at the cost of double delay; Pro-
picman and ProPHET have about 20 times less overhead at
the price of double and three times delay respectively. This
is reasonable because in CiPRO, senders only send control
messages and messages when they have a high probability
to encounter the destination or when they encounter
neighbors that have a high probability to meet the destina-
tions in the future. Whereas, in Propicman, control mes-
sages are sent regularly regardless of the existence of
neighbors, or if these neighbors are useful or not to bring
the messages to the destination. Nodes in ProPHET ex-
change information whenever they meet each other, there-
fore, this technique is quite costly in terms of network
overhead in comparison with Propicman and CiPRO. The
significant advantage of Propicman in comparison with
Epidemic and ProPHET techniques is that even if in Propic-
man the control message is sent regularly, the message
content is only sent when the senders encounter the desti-
nation or encounter neighbors with a high encounter
probability.
The network overhead parameter depends on the den-
sity of the nodes (thus the density of neighbors). Especially
in CiPro case, this parameter strongly depends on the den-
sity of the nodes that have high encounter probabilities
with the destination. The point of cycle 10 in Fig. 7b can
be the case that even the node density is high, but there
are very few neighbors that have high encounter probabil-
ities. Therefore, senders in CiPro do not broadcast the con-
trol packet and message content. As a result, we can see
that the overhead of CiPro is very low.
Thanks to the ability to predict the suitable time and
places for message delivering, CiPRO has significantly less
network overhead than Propicman, without costing much
more than it in terms of delay, and being much better than
ProPHET. This happens because the usage of spatial and
temporal context information allows a more precise mes-
sage forwarding (when and where some node with higher
probability is expected) than ProPHET and Propicman that
only use context information of current neighbors.
We expect that the delay parameter of Propicman and
ProPHET is decreased while increasing the number of
neighbors selected at each routing process. On the other
hand, we also expect that the network overhead is in-
creased when more network nodes are involved in the
routing process. In order to evaluate it, we increase the
number of nodes involved in the following way: at each
candidate selection step, if the sender receives the encoun-
ter probability values from its neighbors that are higher
than its encounter probability, it sends the message con-
tent up to (if there are) 20% of the nodes that have the high
delivery probabilities. Fig. 8, when compared to Fig. 7
shows that when there are more neighbors selected to
1566 H.A. Nguyen, S. Giordano / Ad Hoc Networks 10 (2012) 1557–1569

Transmission delay Normalized network overhead (Logarithmic scale)

2500 6.0
Propicman

Normalized network overhead

ProPhet
Epidemic
2000 CiPro
5.0
seconds

1500
4.0
1000

3.0 Propicman
500
ProPhet
Epidemic
CiPro
0 2.0
0 5 10 15 20 25 0 5 10 15 20 25
Messages Messages

Fig. 7. (a and b) show the delay and the overhead of CiPRO, Propicman, Prophet compared to Epidemic when only the neighbor with the highest encounter
probability is selected. Figure (b) shows the semi-logarithmic plot of overhead comparison. In (b), the overhead caused by CiPRO is around two orders of
magnitude less than Epidemic at the cost of double delay (a), whereas (a) shows that CiPRO has around 2 times. Propicman and ProPHET have about 20
times less overhead at the price of double and three times delay respectively. CiPRO has the best performance in term of network overhead (confidence
level=95%).

Transmission delay Normalized network overhead (Logarithmic scale)

1200 6.0
Normalized network overhead

Propicman
ProPhet Propicman
1000 Epidemic ProPhet
CiPro Epidemic
CiPro
800 5.0
seconds

600

400 4.0

200

0 3.0
0 5 10 15 20 25 0 5 10 15 20 25
Messages Messages

Fig. 8. (a and b) show the delay and the overhead of CiPRO, Propicman, Prophet compared to Epidemic when only the neighbor with the highest encounter
probability is selected. Fig. 7b shows the semi-logarithmic plot of overhead comparison. In (b), the overhead caused by CiPRO is around two orders of
magnitude less than Epidemic at the cost of double delay (a), whereas (a) shows that CiPRO has around 2 times. Propicman and ProPHET have about 20
times less overhead at the price of double and three times delay respectively. CiPRO has the best performance in term of network overhead (confidence
level=95%).

send the message content at each routing process, delay is by the sender to forward the message content. Thus, there
reduced at the price of higher overhead. However, as the is no significant change in terms of overhead as each time,
gain in terms of delay is not high, we can conclude that only the neighbor with the highest encounter probability is
there is no evident advantage in selecting more than one selected (in other words, the maximum number of neigh-
neighbor (assuming no losses). Clearly, if we release the bors that will receive the message is fixed by the protocol).
assumption that no message is lost, the problem changes, We can only appreciate some improvement in terms of de-
and this is matter of ongoing work. lay as we increase the probability of finding a better for-
warder as we increase the population. Similar reasoning
4.3.2. Impact of the node density applies to CIPRO, where the overhead also remains quite
We investigate the scalability of the routing algorithms stable, and we observe some improvements in terms of de-
by increasing the number of nodes from 50 up to 250 lay (Fig. 9).
nodes in steps of 50. On the contrary, if we increase the node density, there
In Propicman, senders regularly broadcast the control are more nodes involved, messages in the flooding-based
message to find the best forwarder(s). Only the neighbor routing scheme will quickly invade the entire network.
that has the highest encounter probability will be selected As a result, the message will reach the destination more
 H.A. Nguyen, S. Giordano / Ad Hoc Networks 10 (2012) 1557–1569 1567

Delay with different node densities Overhead with different numbers of nodes
8
Epidemic Epidemic

Normalized network overhead

ProPHET ProPHET
7 Propicman
Propicman
CiPRO CiPRO
6 1
Normalized delay

2 0.1

1 0.05

0 0
50 100 150 200 250 50 100 150 200 250
Number of Nodes Number of Nodes

Fig. 9. (a and b) show the delay and the overhead of CiPRO, Propicman, Prophet and Epidemic in the case of varying the number of nodes. The delay and
overhead of Epidemic are normalized to 1 and the other algorithms are normalized by the Epidemic curves. With more nodes involved, the delay caused by
Epidemic is dramatically decreased, whereas the delays caused by ProPHET, Propicman and CiPRO are slightly decreased. The network overhead caused by
Epidemic is much increased, the overhead caused by ProPHET is slightly increased. The overhead caused by CiPRO and ProPHET shows to be less dependent
on the number of nodes (confidence level=88%).

quickly (Fig. 9a), thus the message delay is decreased.
However, because of the flooding of messages on the net-
work, this routing technique is very costly in terms of net-
work overhead in comparison with the other techniques as
shown in Fig. 9b. Increasing the number of nodes is also
important in ProPHET, if we increase the number of nodes,
the number of contacts that a node may have will increase.
As a consequence, there are more control packets ex-
changed, thus more overhead uploaded to the network.
To conclude, if we increase the node density, the mes-
sage delay is much improved in the case of Epidemic,
slightly improved in the case of ProPHET, Propicman and
CiPRO as there may be more nodes with high delivery
probabilities. However, Epidemic is very costly in terms
of network overhead, this parameter is slightly increased
in the case of ProPHET as there are more control packets
exchanged between nodes. In the case of Propicman and
CiPRO, increasing the node density does not significantly
impact the performance of the algorithms.
5. Conclusion and future work
We applied the BackPropagation Neural Network model
to predict the behavior of device carriers. The evaluation
analysis and the simulation results indicate that for the
context-based routing algorithms in OppNets, CiPRO –
the BNN-based solution – outperforms other routing solu-
tions thanks to its ability to maximize the delivery ratio
and to minimize the network overhead.
This work is the first contribution to date that employs
the BNN model to predict the mobility pattern in OppNets.
In our future work, we will continue to evaluate the perfor-
mance of CiPRO by evaluating the impact of the number of
frequent contacts to the CiPRO performance. Especially, in
order to better evaluate our social context-based routing
techniques, currently we are doing a real experiment to
capture the real social contact with the participants wear-
ing sensor nodes (Telosb). The collected traces will be the
first case of contact traces with context information.
The other interesting work is to investigate the possibil-
ity of leveraging long term repetitive patterns in the
behavior of nodes to minimize the overhead of the learning
process and therefore the computational cost.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Prof. Luca Maria Gambardella
(IDSIA-Istituto Dalle Molle di Studi sull’Intelligenza Artifi-
ciale) for his valuable suggestions in prediction with Neu-
ral Networks. We also would like to thank the reviewers
for their insightful comments on the paper.
Appendix A. Training data with BNN model: synaptic
weights, learning rate adjustments
For any given training sequence, this value is a function
of the synaptic weights of the network. So, to reduce the
error, it is necessary to control the gradient of the error
function with respect to each synaptic weight. One may
then move each synaptic weight slightly in the opposite
direction to the gradient. The gradient is defined as the
vector of partial derivatives of the multivariate function
with respect to each variable. Because the error function
is a function of the network output, we first need to
calculate the partial derivative of the network output
with respect to each associated connection weight.
Since all other variables but the one of interest are held
constant when we calculate the partial derivative, only
one linear term is left in the calculation of the partial deriv-
ative of the output, and leaving the coefficient - which is
just the corresponding input. So we compute the synaptic
weight adjustment of the vertical and horizontal inputs
as follows:
The synaptic weight of the vertical input – wv:
dE dE dPpred dm
¼ : ðA:1Þ
dwv dPpred dm dwv
From Eqs. 4, 5, 7, we have:
1568 H.A. Nguyen, S. Giordano / Ad Hoc Networks 10 (2012) 1557–1569
dE dP pred 1 dm
¼ Ppred  Pactual ; ¼ ;
dPpred dm wv þ wh dwv
dðIv wv þ Ih wh Þ
¼ ¼ Iv :
dwv
Eq. (A.1) becomes:
dE 1 vehicle-based disruption-tolerant networking, in: IEEE INFOCOM,
¼ ðPpred  P actual Þ Iv :
dwv wv þ wh
1
Let bi ¼ ðP pred  Pactual Þ wv þw - this is the proportional
h
amount of the product of the error signal. We have the syn-
aptic weight adjustment of the vertical input:
Dwv ¼ gv bi Iv : ðA:2Þ
We do the same for the horizontal input and have the syn-
aptic weight adjustment:
Dwh ¼ gh bi Ih ; ðA:3Þ
where g is the learning rate. The learning procedure re-
quires that the change of synaptic weights is proportional
dE
to dw . The constant of proportional is the learning rate.
When the learning rate is low, small steps are taken in
the gradient direction; when the learning rate is high, large
steps are taken. For practical purposes, we choose a learn-
ing rate that is as large as possible without leading to oscil-
lation. The pseudo-Newton method [23] proposed the
adaptive learning rates as follows:
1 1
gv ¼  2  ; gh ¼  2  :
d Eþ1
d2 w v
d Eþ1 d2 wh
In the pseudo-Newton case, the learning rate is low when
the absolute value of the second order derivative is high
and vice versa. That is, if the error surface has high curva-
ture – corresponding to large changes in the gradient over
small intervals – the step size is small to avoid catastrophic
steps in the wrong direction.
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Hoang Anh Nguyen is a Ph.D candidate at the
Networking Labs, Information System and
Networking Institute (ISIN), University of
Applied Sciences (SUPSI), Switzerland. He
holds an M.Sc degree in Computer Science
from Institute National Polytechnique de
Toulouse (INPT), France. Actually, he is
working on context-based routing protocols
in opportunistic networks.
Silvia Giordano holds a Ph.D from EPFL,
Switzerland. She is currently the head of the
Networking Lab (NetLab) in the Institute of
System for Informatics and Networking (ISIN),
and as direction member of ISIN, at the Uni-
versity of Applied Science – SUPSI in Ticino,
Switzerland. She is teaching several courses in
the areas of: Networking, Wireless and Mobile
Networking, Quality of Services and Networks
Applications.
She is co-editor of the book ’’Mobile Ad Hoc
Networking’’ (IEEE-Wiley 2004). She has
published extensively on journals, magazines and conferences in the
areas of quality of services, traffic control, wireless and mobile ad hoc
networks. She has participated in several European ACTS/IST projects and
 H.A. Nguyen, S. Giordano / Ad Hoc Networks 10 (2012) 1557–1569
European Science Foundation (ESF) activities. Since 1999 she serves as
Technical Editor of IEEE Communications Magazine, and is currently
editor of the series co-editor of the new Series on Ad Hoc And Sensor
Networks of the IEEE Communication Magazine. She is also editor of Ad
hoc networks journal by Elsevier, Ad Hoc & Sensor Wireless Networks
journal, Ocpscience, Journal of Ubiquitous Computing and Intelligence
(JUCI) and Journal of Autonomic and Trusted Computing (JoATC) both by
American Scientific Publishers (ASP), and Mediterranean Journal of
Computer and Networks, SoftMotor. She was already co-editor of several
special issues of IEEE Communications Magazine and Baltzer MONET and
Cluster Computing on mobile ad hoc networking and QoS networking.
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She will be general chair of WoWMoM 2009, program co-chair of IEEE
PERCOM 2009, was program co-chair of IEEE VTC-Fall 2008, IEEE MASS
2007, workshop chair of IEEE WOWMoM 2007, tutorial chair of MobiHoc
2006, general chair of IEEE WONS 2005, organizer of IEEE Persens 2005–
2009 workshop, IEEE AOC2005–2009 workshop and ACM Mobihoc SANET
workshop 2007–2008 and is/was on the executive committee and TCP of
several international conferences, and serves as reviewer on transactions
and journals, as well as for several important conferences. Prof. Silvia
Giordano is a member of IEEE Computer Society, ACM and IFIP WG 6.8.
Her current research interests include wireless and mobile ad hoc net-
works, QoS and traffic control.