Abstract
Recent years have seen an explosive growth in data-hungry mobile services, including social networking, video conferencing, photos, and streaming video, motivating the design of more efficient networking technologies. Opportunistic networking (OppNet) has emerged as a potential solution; however, there remain several different research issues that need to be addressed before mainstream adoption is practical. In an OppNet, mobile nodes are able to communicate without an available end-to-end path or explicit knowledge of the network topology. Instead, mobile devices carry data until an opportunity arises to forward it to a peer via a short-range wireless link. The start of this chapter discusses wireless mobile communication in general, before giving an overview of OppNets and their applications in the context of general wireless communications. The specific problem of efficient data delivery in OppNets is then considered, addressing the limitations of current approaches and what is needed to overcome these. Finally, repository-based data dissemination (RDD) is introduced as a proposed approach to improve data delivery in practical OppNets