A social transitivity-based data dissemination scheme for opportunistic networks

Abstract

A social-based routing protocol for opportunistic networks considers the direct delivery as forwarding metrics. By ignoring the indirect delivery through intermediate nodes, it misses chances to find paths that are better in terms of delivery ratio and time. To overcome this limitation, we propose to incorporate transitivity, which considers the indirect delivery through intermediate nodes, as one of the forwarding metrics. We also found that some message forwards do not improve the delivery performance. To reduce the number of these useless forwards, the proposed scheme forwards messages to an encountered node when the increase of total utility value is greater than a threshold. Using a simulator with real world trace data sets, we compare the proposed scheme with the existing protocols, epidemic routing and SimBetTS. Compared with SimBetTS, the proposed scheme increases delivery ratio by 1.5 percent and decreases delay time by 2 percent while reducing overhead by 30 percent.