SOCRATIC: A social approach to network coding rate control

Tactical and emergency-response networks require efficient communication without a managed infrastructure. Recent work demonstrates that applying information-centric paradigms to the tactical edge can provide performance benefits over traditional address centric approaches. We propose SOCRATIC (SOCial RATe control for Information Centric networks), an approach that unifies replication and network coding to disseminate content by taking advantage of social content and context heuristics. SOCRATIC replicates network encoded blocks according to a popularity index metric that is shared during neighbor discovery. The number of encoded blocks that is relayed to a node depends on its own interest in a data object and its social popularity, i.e., how often and for how long the node meets other nodes. These blocks are subsequently replicated towards the subscriber if a stable path exists. We evaluate an implementation of SOCRATIC through network emulation of a tactical scenario and demonstrate that it can achieve better performance than traditional socially agnostic approaches.