Social-aware Routing Protocol Research Articles

Analysis the Effect of Transmission Cost on TTL and Number of Nodes in Social Aware Routing Protocols

Analysis the Effect of Transmission Cost on TTL and Number of Nodes in Social Aware Routing Protocols

A social-aware routing protocol for opportunistic networks

Understanding nodes mobility is of fundamental importance for data delivery in opportunistic and intermittently connected networks referred to as Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs). The analysis of such mobility patterns and the understanding of how mobile nodes interact play a critical role when designing new routing protocols for DTNs. The Cultural Greedy Ant (CGrAnt) protocol is a hybrid Swarm Intelligence-based approach designed to address the routing problem in such dynamic and complex environment. CGrAnt is based on: (1) Cultural Algorithms (CA) and Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and (2) operational metrics that characterize the opportunistic social connectivity between wireless users. The most promising message forwarders are selected via a greedy transition rule based mainly on local information captured from the DTN environment. Whenever global information is available, it can also be used to support decisions. We compare the performance of CGrAnt with Epidemic, PROPHET, and dLife protocols in two different mobility scenarios under varying networking parameters. Results obtained by the ONE simulator show that CGrAnt achieves a higher message delivery and lower message redundancy than the three protocols in both scenarios. The only exception is in one of the scenarios, when messages have a time to live lower than 900 min, where CGrAnt delivers a bit less messages than dLife, although with a lower message redundancy.

Social-Aware Stateless Routingin Pocket Switched Networks

Existing social-aware routing protocols for packet switched networks make use of the information about the social structure of the network deduced by state information of nodes (e.g., history of past encounters) to optimize routing. Although these approaches are shown to have superior performance to social-oblivious, stateless routing protocols (BinarySW, Epidemic), the improvement comes at the cost of considerable storage overhead required on the nodes. In this paper we present SANE, the first routing mechanism that combines the advantages of both social-aware and stateless approaches. SANE is based on the observation - that we validate on a real-world trace - that individuals with similar interests tend to meet more often. In SANE, individuals (network members) are characterized by their interest profile, a compact representation of their interests. By implementing a simple routing rule based on interest profile similarity, SANE is free of network state information, thus overcoming the storage capacity problem with existing social-aware approaches. Through thorough experiments, we show the superiority of SANE over existing approaches, both stateful, social-aware and stateless, social-oblivious. We discuss the statelessness of our approach in the supplementary file, which can be found on the Computer Society Digital Library at http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TPDS.2014.2307857, of this manuscript. Our interest-based approach easily enables innovative networking services, such as interest-casting. An interest-casting protocol is also introduced in this paper, and evaluated through experiments based on both real-world and synthetic mobility traces.

A Survey of Social-Aware Routing Protocols in Delay Tolerant Networks: Applications, Taxonomy and Design-Related Issues

In the past few years, more and more researchers have paid close attention to the emerging field of delay tolerant networks (DTNs), in which network often partitions and end-to-end paths do not exist nearly all the time. To cope with these challenges, most routing protocols employ the store-carry-forward strategy to transmit messages. However, the difficulty of this strategy is how to choose the best relay node and determine the best time to forward messages. Fortunately, social relations among nodes can be used to address these problems. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of recent social-aware routing protocols, which offer an insight into how to utilize social relationships to design efficient and applicable routing algorithms in DTNs. First, we review the major practical applications of DTNs. Then, we focus on understanding social ties between nodes and investigating some design-related issues of social-based routing approaches, e.g., the ways to obtain social relations among nodes, the metrics and approaches to identify the characteristics of social ties, the strategies to optimize social-aware routing protocols, and the suitable mobility traces to evaluate these protocols. We also create a taxonomy for social-aware routing protocols according to the sources of social relations. Finally, we outline several open issues and research challenges.