Social-Similarity-Aware TCP With Collision Avoidance in Ad Hoc Social Networks

An ad hoc social network (ASNET), which explores social connectivity between users of mobile devices, is becoming one of the most important forms of today's Internet. In this context, maximum bandwidth utilization of intermediate nodes in resource scarce environments is one of the challenging tasks. The traditional Transport Control Protocol (TCP) uses the round-trip time mechanism for sharing bandwidth resources between users. However, it does not explore socially aware properties between nodes and cannot differentiate effectively between various types of packet losses in wireless networks. In this paper, a socially aware congestion avoidance protocol, namely, TIBIAS, which takes advantage of similarity-matching social properties among intermediate nodes, is proposed to improve the resource efficiency of ASNETs. TIBIAS performs efficient data transfer over TCP. During the course of bandwidth resource allocation, it gives high priority for maximally matched interest similarity between different TCP connections on ASNET links. TIBIAS does not require any modification at lower layers or on receiver nodes. Experimental results show that TIBIAS performs better as compared with existing protocols, in terms of link utilization, unnecessary reduction of the congestion window, throughput, and retransmission ratio.