SCARF: A SoCial-Aware Reliable Forwarding Technique for Vehicular Communications

The Internet-of-Vehicles allows the coexistence of traditional Internet applications with the Internet-of-Things, so that vehicles can communicate not only among them but also to neighboring devices and humans as well. In this context, the human social behavior is a fundamental aspect that needs to be taken into account specially for message dissemination in Vehicular Social Networks. In this paper, we present a probabilistic broadcast protocol that exploits the "social degree" of a vehicle to be selected as next-hop forwarder. The social degree of a vehicle depends on its social activity inside a vehicular social network, so that a vehicle that uses to access and post often in a given vehicular social network is more likely to be "socially trusted". Selecting a trusted vehicle as next-hop forwarder allows a secure and faster message dissemination with respect to an "asocial" vehicle. Simulation results show that a socially trusted vehicle improves network performance, expressed in terms of overall throughput.