Social-based hierarchical routing in delay-tolerant networks

Routing is one of the most challenging problems in delay-tolerant networks (DTNs) because of end-toend disconnections. Although social-based approaches can be used to address the problem, most existing solutions focus on routing messages to nodes with higher social metrics, which would result in messages getting stuck at local maxima. In this paper, we exploit the hierarchical community structure to provide forwarding path from source to destination. To this end, we use the community detection algorithm to uncover communities. The hierarchical structure is obtained by constructing node relation and community relation graphs. Simulation results show that our approach improves delivery performance significantly when compared to other social-based routing protocols, SimBet and Bubble Rap.