Low Energy Socially Cognizant Routing for Delay Tolerant Mobile Networks

Abstract

Many message delivery services are based on publish-subscribe systems designed to distribute updates through centralized infrastructures requiring active Internet connections. For mobile devices, individual nodes should have the ability to propagate messages to interested users over ad-hoc wireless connections thereby removing the dependence on Internet and centralized servers. These nodes are sometimes stationary, but are often mobile, creating intermittent networks of nodes that tend to be socially related. In this paper, we propose LESC, a delay-tolerant message delivery protocol, which facilitates efficient message dissemination in a decentralized, ad-hoc fashion and can be implemented using a commodity mobile communication technology such as Bluetooth LE. By leveraging the frequent collocation of socially related peers, nodes strategically become information carriers with the ability to propagate messages to out of range nodes in the future. We design a discrete event simulator that utilizes actual traveling paths derived from Google Maps. The simulator emulates LESC and the epidemic routing protocol to determine if we can achieve reasonable performance. Related works have approached the problem of publish-subscribe systems on mobile devices, but to the best of our knowledge, have not shown the feasibility of a protocol that can directly be implemented over current commodity wireless technologies. We simulate the protocol in Matlab and allow nodes to have multiple publications and subscriptions simultaneously.