Routing in Delay Tolerant Mobile Social Networks

Abstract

Mobile social networks (MSNs) are a special kind of delay tolerant network (DTN), in which mobile
users move around and communicate with each other via their carried short-distance wireless
communication devices. Typical MSNs include pocket switch networks, mobile vehicular networks,
mobile sensor networks, etc. As more users exploit portable short-distance wireless communication
devices (such as smart phones, iPads, mobile PCs, and sensors in vehicles) to contact and share data
between each other in a cheap way, MSNs attract more attention. Since MSNs experience intermittent
connectivity incurred by the mobility of users, routing is a mainly concerning and challenging
problem. Recently, some social-aware routing algorithms that are based on social network analysis
have been proposed, such as Bubble Rap, SimBet, and algorithms, etc. Two key concepts in social
network analysis are: (i) community, which is a group of people with social relations; (ii) centrality,
which indicates the social relations between a node and other nodes in a community. Based on the two
concepts, these algorithms detect the communities and compute the centrality value for each node.
Messages are delivered via the nodes with good centralities. Since social relations of mobile users
generally have long-term characteristics and are less volatile than node mobility, social-aware
algorithms outperform traditional DTN algorithms, such as flooding-based algorithms and
probability-based algorithms. Despite this, these algorithms tend to forward messages to the nodes
with locally best centralities.