Socially-Aware Publish/Subscribe System for Human Networks

The development of modern communication technologies fosters human networks (HUNETs)-an information dissemination platform comprised of human-carried wireless-enabled devices. These networks are promising applications of delay tolerant networks (DTNs). However, existing DTN routing protocols do not address unique problems in HUNETs and are unable to utilize the benefits of human mobility. In this paper, we present a publish/subscribe system for HUNETs. In our system, brokers are responsible for collecting subscriptions and dispatching messages, which provide better flexibility and scalability. The core component of our system is a socially-aware broker allocation algorithm called, social election. Social election trades off between the efficiency and overhead, by dynamically controlling the number of brokers in the network. A replication scheme and a buffer management method based on utility are also proposed to facilitate efficient message forwarding. We demonstrate, through simulations, that our system performs well in realistic networks under extensive conditions.