Social-Based Multi-label Routing in Delay Tolerant Networks

In Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs), the connections between mobile nodes are intermittent and constant end-to-end paths rarely exist. In recent years, social-based approaches, which attempt to exploit social behaviors of DTN nodes to make better routing decision, have drawn tremendous interests in DTN routing design. However, most of these algorithms always select the same next hop as relay under the same routing metric in routing choice, which may cause the energy exhaustion of single node. In this paper, we proposed a routing algorithm based on the multi-label social attributes, seeking for the weak social tie through constructing the social graph of nodes, which extended the lifetime of networks by taking the residual energy of nodes into account. Simulation results in urban settings showed the algorithm performs best in terms of the average network lifetime, with 20% ~ 70% increases compared with some existing algorithms.