Friendship Based Routing in Delay Tolerant Mobile Social Networks

Abstract

Routing in delay tolerant networks (DTN) have attracted a great interest recently. Increasingly popular type of DTNs are mobile social networks (MSN) also called pocket switched networks. Hence, analyzing accurately social network properties has become an important issue in designing efficient routing protocols for MSNs. In this paper, we first introduce a new metric for detecting the quality of friendships accurately. Using the introduced metric, each node defines its friendship community as the set of nodes having close friendship with itself either directly or indirectly. Then, we present Friendship Based Routing in which temporally differentiated friendships are used to make the forwarding decisions of messages. Real trace-driven simulation results show that the introduced algorithm achieves better delivery rate while forwarding fewer messages than the existing algorithms.