Impact of altruism on opportunistic communications

Opportunistic networking largely relies on human-carried devices as relays to move data across the network. Human altruistic behavior is an important factor in the feasibility and performance of such a system. In this paper, we study the impact of different altruism distributions on the system throughput and delay of opportunistic communications. We evaluate the system performance by utilizing social network topological models and experimental human mobility traces with different communication patterns. We also discuss several observations from the result of the study. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study of the impact of altruism on opportunistic communications.