A Multicast Routing Scheme Based on Social Differences in Delay-Tolerant Networks

In Delay-Tolerant Networks (DTNs), multicast can make full use of network resources and provide high data delivery ratio, which is widely used in a variety of group communication scenarios, such as data dissemination in rescue circumstances, group message transmission in mobile social networks, etc. As node behaviors demonstrate social characteristics in DTNs, in this paper, a multicast routing scheme based on social difference (SDMR) is proposed. SDMR considers the social differences between nodes, including both the similarity and the centrality differences. SDMR chooses the nodes with greater social differences to forward data, which can expand the data transmission coverage and thus increases the data delivery ratio to multicast destinations efficiently. Through extensive trace-driven simulation with the Infocom06 Trace data, it shows that SDMR can not only ensure high data delivery ratio and low delay, but also reduce the transmission cost greatly compared to other protocols.