A dynamic topological potential and social relationship based routing protocol for mobile social delay tolerant networks

The design of routing protocol in mobile social delay tolerant networks is a tricky issue due to lack of stable end-to-end path, frequent link disconnection and changeable network topology. This paper proposes a novel routing algorithm based on dynamic topological potential and social relationship (DTPSR) between nodes for mobile social delay tolerant networks. In DTPSR, we define three metrics to describe the status of a node, the direct and indirect relationship between nodes respectively. Then these metrics are used to construct different utility functions and determine the optimal relay node for different situations. The extensive simulations prove that DTPSR significantly improves the delivery ratio while reducing the transmission delay and relay hops without excessive increase in computation and storage overhead. This indicates that DTPSR algorithm can find the optimal relay node more accurately.