SEBAR: Social-Energy-Based Routing for Mobile Social Delay-Tolerant Networks

Delay-tolerant networks (DTNs) are intermittently connected networks, such as mobile social networks formed by human-carried mobile devices. Routing in such mobile social DTNs is very challenging, as it must handle network partitioning, long delays, and dynamic topology. Recently, social-based approaches, which attempt to exploit social behaviors of DTN nodes to make better routing decision, have drawn tremendous interest in the DTN routing design. In this paper, we propose a novel social-based routing approach for mobile social DTNs, where a new metric, i.e., social energy, is introduced to quantify the ability of a node to forward packets to others, inspired by general laws in particle physics. Social energy is generated via node encounters and shared by the communities of encountering nodes. Similar to the radiation of energy in physics, the social energy of any node decays over time. Our proposed social-energy-based routing (SEBAR) protocol considers social energy of encountering nodes and is in favor of the node with a higher social energy in its or the destination's social community. Our simulations with real-life wireless traces demonstrate the efficiency and the effectiveness of the SEBAR method by comparing it with several existing DTN routing schemes. In addition, two variations of SEBAR with the aim of overhead reduction are also presented and evaluated.