FCER routing using temporal closeness centrality for delay tolerant network

Social networks have brought a whole new era of staying connected with family, friends and even strangers. This enables us in finding similar kind of people around us or locating who is important for us. Indirectly it measures the relations with whom we have connected through social metrics e.g. Centrality, similarity etc. The same concept can be applied for efficient routing in disconnected networks where, disconnection is not the fault or failure but an inherent part of partitioned network. Routing in such a challenged environment is challenging task. Due to episodic connectivity, it uses store-carry-forward mechanism to route the messages. This paper discusses about the use of social network metrics for routing decision. First of all social network properties such centrality, diameter etc. are studied. Then, using closeness centrality network density is evaluated at a regular interval. Network density is checked to identify whether the network is sparse or dense. In case the network is dense, first contact based forwarding is called. Otherwise, encounter based replication is used for spare network. We called this router as First Contact & Encounter Based routing protocol and is implemented using the Opportunistic Network Environment simulator. First Contact & Encounter Based routing is compared and evaluated with the Epidemic and PRoPHET for delivery ratio, overhead and the number of dropped messages.