Interest-driven forwarding for delay-tolerant mobile ad hoc networks

In the era of pervasive mobile computing, human encounters can be leveraged to enable new forms of social interactions mediated by the personal devices of individuals. In this framework, emerging needs, such as content dissemination, social discovery and question&answering, advocate the raising of novel communication paradigms where the binding content-recipients is not provided by the sender (in the classical IP addressing style), but directly executed by specific recipients with interest on it. This allows tagged contents to be freely advertised on the network according to a content-driven approach; human encounters drive the information towards potential recipients that extract it from the stream when content type and personal interest match. This very active research area has recently produced a few preliminary solutions to this networking problem; they inherently confine message delivery inside a specific location and/or community. This covers only a part of users needs, as emerging from everyday life experience and recent studies in human sciences. This paper proposes a novel communication protocol, named InterestCast, or ICast, solving the problem for a wide range of social scenarios and applying to a delay tolerant ad hoc network whose nodes are the personal device of moving individuals, possibly interacting with fixed road-side devices. The protocol is able to chase users interests decoupling content tags from locations and social communities. The main advantages the proposal achieves are: it ensures remarkable performance results; it is simple and, thus, it is feasible and keeps computational and networking costs low; it preserves users privacy.