Community Based Routing in Social Delay Tolerant Networks

Since communication devices are carried by people in a great number of delay tolerant networks, delay tolerant networks are one kind of social networks to some extent. Analyzing social properties has become an important issue in designing efficient routing protocols. In this paper, a more accurate and comprehensive metric for detecting the quality of the relationships between nodes is proposed considering contact time, contact frequency and contact regularity. Then an overlapping hierarchical community detection method is designed based on this new metric and a tree structure is built. Furthermore, we exploit the overlapping community structure and the tree structure to provide message forwarding path from source node to destination node. Simulation results show that our routing method based on overlapping hierarchical community detection (ROCD)achieves better delivery rate than the classic routing protocols SimBet and Bubble Rap without affecting the average delay.