Geo-social: Routing with location and social metrics in mobile opportunistic networks

Mobile opportunistic networks (MONs) are intermittently connected networks, in which a multitude of mobile devices are carried by people and packets are delivered among devices via opportunistic communications. Routing in MONs is very challenging as it must handle network partitioning, long delays, and dynamic topology. Recently, new possibilities of social-based approaches which use social characteristics of mobile nodes to make forwarding decisions become a new trend in MONs. In this paper, we consider the location history with access patterns of a mobile user as its social features as well and propose several new geo-social metrics which reflect the location and social relationships among users. Several new routing algorithms are designed based on these new geo-social metrics to achieve efficient and stable routing in MONs. We evaluate them with a large-scale real-life mobile tracing dateset. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of proposed geo-social methods.