Geo-Social Distance-Based Data Dissemination for Socially Aware Networking

The Internet of Things (IoT), which could connect everything in the world, is promising for the realization of smart cities. However, vehicles connected in the IoT challenges data collection and transmission. Socially aware networking is an emerging paradigm for high-efficiency data dissemination. Existing protocols take advantage of mobile nodes' social characteristics (e.g., user interest) to improve dissemination performance. However, they have not exploited enough of what relations are valuable between user interests and how these relations can affect the dissemination of social IoTs. This paper takes advantage of interest inclusion and intersection to solve the dissemination problem in a conference scenario. By constructing the structure of the Interest Tree to solely represent the relations of interest inclusion and interest intersection, we integrate vehicles' social factors into their geographical information, and introduce the concept of geo-social distance (GSD) as the basis of the proposed strategy. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of our presented method by comparing with two other existing protocols in terms of four objective metrics, which include delivery ratio, overhead, hop-count, and average latency.