Losero: A locality sensitive routing protocol in opportunistic networks

User trajectories can be used to extrapolate personal information such as interests and movement patterns. Extrapolating this information is especially important in the context of opportunistic networks, which take advantage of human mobility and their interactions to deliver messages to relevant users. In this paper, we propose a Geo-casting routing protocol called LoSeRO for opportunistic networks, which uses knowledge of the locations most frequently visited by a user to route messages. LoSeRO forwards messages-in a multicasting way- to all users who have a mobility profile that intersects the packet's destination zone. In particular, users' mobility profile is based on pre-defined zones, and LoSeRO generates a mobility vector, called MobyZone, populated by the most n-frequented zones. Thus, if the destination zone of the packet belongs to the MobyZone of a user, then the user is chosen as valid candidate for receiving the packet. Efficiency of our protocol has been evaluated using different metrics, such as coverage, precision and success rate, and compared to that of state-of-the-art geo-casting protocols. Simulations show that LoSeRO reaches the best compromise among the mentioned evaluation metrics.