Social Selfishness Aware Multi-copy Routing in Mobile Social Networks

Abstract

With the development of the technologies of handheld devices, Mobile Social Networks (MSNs), as a new type of Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs), have aroused great attention. And the study of effective data forwarding scheme in MSNs becomes a focus. Different from conventional DTNs, the routings in MSNs need to consider nodes’ social selfishness. Social selfishness often causes nodes are just willing to forward packets for their own trust nodes, which makes routing in MSNs become a challenge. To adapt to the social selfishness in MSNs, we propose TBMC, a Trust Based Multi-copy protocol. In our design, node trust degree is firstly defined to demonstrate the data forwarding capacity of a node in social selfishness environment. Then, based on the node trust degree, TBMC is presented, which consists of two phases: the adaptive binary spray phase and the direct delivery phase. In order to avoid node social selfishness leads to binary spray inefficient, a scheme of trust degree threshold is introduced in TBMC, which makes TBMC is adaptive to various social selfishness degrees. Moreover, effective copy number control scheme ensures packets delivery within specific delay targets with minimum traffic cost.