Enabling geo-centric communication technologies in opportunistic networks

OPPORTUNISTIC NETWORKS (ONs) have been attracting great interest from research community. The nature of ONs that data communication naturally does not require contemporaneous end-to-end connectivity, has been enabling a range of applications in Smart Cities. Although suffering from a large variation of network topology due to nodal mobility, numerous previous routing protocols proposed in ONs still make effort on qualifying delivery potential via network topology information only. Geographic routing is an alternative, conceptually, by relying on the geographic information instead of topological information. However, this technique branch has not been adequately investigated in ONs. In this chapter, the research motivation and challenges for bringing geographic routing protocols in ONs are introduced. An up-to-date review on well known geographic routing protocols in ONs is provided. Finally, potential future directions leading ongoing research in this explicit topic are given.