Social network exploitation for data sharing in disconnected MANET

Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is form of Ad Hoc Network that can change the location and configure itself. In MANET, mobile devices are connected without wires and have no infrastructure. Increasing usage of Social Network through the mobile devices contributed to the need of data sharing between the mobile users. Peer-to-peer file sharing applications enable users to share various files without a central server and with more scalability. For efficient file searching nodes that has common interest and frequently meet are grouped to form a community. The nodes with the common interest are identified based on the threshold value. The node mobility and threshold governs the community construction process. For intra-community searching, the nodes with more frequent links with community members is chosen as community coordinator and for inter-community file searching, the highly mobile nodes that visit foreign communities is selected as community ambassadors. The values of the threshold used in the community construction process are determined based on the application type, interest of nodes and nodes count in the network. The Optimized Threshold Selection Mechanism (OTSM) is introduced for selecting the optimal threshold. For optimization, the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) which is a method of optimizing the solution to a problem by iteratively trying the possible solutions with respect to the threshold. Altering the count of community coordinator and community ambassadors which depends on the size of the network can be done to avoid the overloading which provides a much better file sharing competence.