Description:
<jats:title>Summary</jats:title><jats:p>A smart opportunistic environment is a physical space, which allows the smart physical objects to communicate in the presence of disruption in connectivity. Because, the objects in such an environment are buffer constrained, some of the objects will not participate in data forwarding, when there is scarcity of storage (buffer) space. In this paper, we focus on such selfish behavior of objects triggered by space constraints in a smart opportunistic environment. We propose a novel data forwarding algorithm, selfishness and buffer‐aware routing (SBR), in which a node is chosen as a relay, based on its <jats:italic>capability</jats:italic>, which is a function of its available buffer space and past encounter history (delivery predictability) with the destination. SBR can efficiently utilize the limited buffer space in a node with a buffer management scheme, WSD. It can also detect space constraint driven selfish behavior of nodes and resolve it using a reputation‐based technique, MSD. We have conducted simulation using both synthetic and real‐world traces for evaluating our proposed SBR algorithm. For analyzing the performance of the algorithm in real‐time, a smart vehicular test‐bed is developed. Simulation results and test‐bed implementation show that our algorithm performs better in terms of higher delivery ratio, lower overhead ratio, and lower delivery delay, compared with existing opportunistic data forwarding algorithms.</jats:p>