Bio‐inspired packet dropping for ad‐hoc social networks

Abstract

SummaryAd‐hoc social networks (ASNETs) explore social properties of nodes in communications. The usage of various social applications in a resource‐scarce environment and the dynamic nature of the network create unnecessary congestion that might degrade the quality of service dramatically. Traditional approaches use drop‐tail or random‐early discard techniques to drop data packets from the intermediate node queue. Nonetheless, because of the unavailability of the social properties, these techniques are not suitable for ASNETs. In this paper, we propose a Bio‐inspired packet dropping (BPD) algorithm for ASNETS. BPD imitates the matching procedure of receptors and epitopes in immune systems to detect congestions. The drop probability settings depend on the selection of data packets, which is based on node popularity level. BPD selects the most prioritized node through social properties, which is inspired by the B‐cell stimulation in immune systems. To fairly prioritize data packets, two social properties are used: (1) similarity and (2) closeness centrality between nodes. Extensive simulations are carried out to evaluate and compare BPD to other existing schemes in terms of mean goodput, mean loss rate, throughput, delay, attained bandwidth, and overhead ratio. The results show that the proposed scheme outperforms these existing schemes. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.