Leveraging D2D multihop communication through social group meeting awareness

The increasing ubiquity of mobile devices with inter-connection capability has leveraged the possibility of device-to-device communication. In the next generation cellular networks, device-to-device communication is already considered a fundamental feature. A problem in multihop D2D networks is how to define forwarding algorithms that simultaneously achieve high delivery ratio and low network overhead. In the past decade, several algorithms were proposed to achieve those goals in the context of delay-tolerant networks. Among them, probabilistic and socially aware approaches have become the most successful strategies. However, existent socially aware algorithms do not account for the underlying dynamics and evolving nature of social groups, and require the ability to detect communities, which is a complex and expensive task. In this work, we introduce an opportunistic routing protocol that is aware of group meetings and their evolution over time. Our algorithm is parameter-free and does not require the detection of communities. In large-scale scenarios, our algorithm achieves approximately the same delivery ratio of the state-of-the-art solution with 40 percent less network overhead.