Interaction based routing algorithm for opportunistic mobile social networks

Opportunistic Mobile Social Networks (MSNs) are a type of delay-tolerant networks that are composed of mobile nodes with social characteristics. Most of current research on forwarding algorithms for MSNs leverages the properties of social networks, such as community and centrality. However, the fundamental property, interaction, has not received sufficient attention. The effects of interactions consist of two parts: direct effects and indirect effects. Most existing work based on interactions takes only direct effects into consideration. We propose a distributed Interaction Based Routing (IBR) algorithm. Our main contribution is a distributed method to compute the popularity of nodes by using the direct and indirect effects of interactions. We compare IBR with Epidemic, Prophet, and BubbleRap under three different scenarios. The results show that IBR improves the forwarding efficiency significantly and independent of the network scenarios.