Community-Based Routing in Vehicular Social Networks

Considering the social features of drivers and passengers on vehicles, different communities may have different levels of demand for each packet. In order to represent this difference, we design a significance value for each packet. Furthermore, a community-based routing protocol in vehicular social networks is proposed, named CRP. When selecting relays, the forwarding priority is calculated by combing the direct and indirect forwarding contributions. The direct forwarding contribution is computed based on the number of neighbor nodes in each community as well as its significance value, while the indirect forwarding contribution indicates the delivery ability in future by using the contact probabilities between communities. Then according to the forwarding priorities and the number of replicas, the new relays are selected and the number of replicas are distributed among new relays. Finally, experiments using real road map and well-designed routes for three communities in Beijing show that CRP outperforms other protocols in terms of the community delivery ratio, while keeping a short delay.