Social feature enhanced group-based routing for wireless delay tolerant networks

Mobile devices in delay tolerant networks (DTNs) are used and carried by people, whose behaviors could be described by social models. Understanding social behaviors and characteristics of mobile users can greatly help the routing decision in DTN routing protocols. However, to obtain the stable and accurate social characteristics in dynamic DTNs is very challenging. To achieve efficient delivery of messages at low costs, in this paper, we propose a novel enhanced social group-based routing protocol in which the relay node is selected based on multi-level cross-community social group information. We apply a simple group formation method with both historical encounters (social relationships in physical world)and social features of mobile users (social relationships in social world) and build multi-level cross-community social groups, which summarize the wide range of social relationships among all mobile participants. Our simulations over a real-life data set demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method by comparing it with several existing DTN routing schemes.