An interest community routing scheme for opportunistic networks

In opportunistic networks, network topology constantly changes and instantaneous end-to-end paths are not available, nodes have narrow transmission ranges, limited storage space and energy. Lately, the consideration of social characteristics provides a new vision in the design of routing protocols and many routing protocols have been proposed to overcome the challenging conditions in the opportunistic networks. In this paper, we propose an Interest Community Routing (ICR) algorithm which is founded on social network theory. Through the observation that people with similar interests are more willing to share their interests and communicate with each other, we define an interest metric and a message header to represent individual interests and data types in the networks. By comparing the similarity between the message header and the interest metric of node, the node will be put into corresponding interest community. After the work of detecting communities, considering the contact information among nodes, we have designed our routing algorithm and divided it into two parts: routing within the community and routing among communities. Finally, we implement our routing algorithm in the simulator. Comparing to other two classic routing algorithms, the results show that the proposed protocol ICR obtains better performance on delivery ratio, average overhead ratio and average packet delay.