A mutual-community-aware routing protocol for mobile social networks

In this paper, we propose a routing protocol for mobile social networks (MSNs) by exploiting the fact that people's daily lives have community preferences. The proposed protocol is capable of efficiently integrating the merits of high delivery ratio, low delivery latency and low resource consumption of the Epidemic, LABEL and BUBBLE protocols for MSNs, while circumventing their respective shortcomings. In our routing protocol, an approach for measuring people's community preference is proposed, both direct meetings in one community and indirect contacts via different communities are considered. The performance of the proposed protocol and that of the three routing protocols as above-mentioned are investigated in the context of our proposed and more realistic mobility model, which jointly considers people's social characteristics, including randomness, Waypoint effect and mutual-community-based relationship. Our studies and performance results show that the proposed protocol is capable of attaining a good trade-off between the average delay of information delivery and the cost of resources for operation of the protocol.