Carry me if you can: A utility based forwarding scheme for content sharing in tourist destinations

Message forwarding is an integral part of the decentralized content sharing process as the content delivery success highly depends on it. Existing literature employs spatio-temporal regularity of human movement pattern and pre-existing social relationship to take message forwarding decisions. However, such approaches are ineffectual in environments where those information are unavailable such as a tourist spot or camping site. In this study, we explore the message forwarding techniques in such environments considering the information that are readily available and can be gathered on the fly. We propose a utility based forwarding scheme to select the appropriate forwarder node based on co-location stay time, connectivity and available resources. A higher co-location stay time reflects that the forwarder and the destination node is likely to have more opportunistic contacts, while the connectivity and available resource ensure that the selected forwarder has sufficient neighbours and resources to carry the message forward. Simulation results suggest that the proposed approach attains high hit and success rate and low latency for successful content delivery, which is comparable to those proposed for work-place type scenarios with regular movement pattern and pre-existing relationships.