Social-aware Opportunistic Routing Protocol based on User's Interactions and Interests

Nowadays, routing proposals must deal with a panoply of heterogeneous devices, intermittent connectivity, and the users' constant need for communication, even in rather challenging networking scenarios. Thus, we propose a Social-aware Content-based Opportunistic Routing Protocol, SCORP, that considers the users' social interaction and their interests to improve data delivery in urban, dense scenarios. Through simulations, using synthetic mobility and human traces scenarios, we compare the performance of our solution against other two social-aware solutions, dLife and Bubble Rap, and the social-oblivious Spray and Wait, in order to show that the combination of social awareness and content knowledge can be beneficial when disseminating data in challenging networks

A Social-aware Routing Protocol for Opportunistic Networks

International audienceThis work proposes the Cultural Greedy Ant (CGrAnt) protocol to solve the problem of data delivery in opportunistic and intermittently connected networks referred to as Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs). CGrAnt is a hybrid Swarm Intelligence-based forwarding protocol designed to address the dynamic and complex environment of DTNs. CGrAnt is based on: (1) Cultural Algorithms (CA) and Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and (2) operationalmetrics that characterize the opportunistic social connectivity between wireless users. The most promising message forwarders are selected via a greedy transition rule based on local and global information captured from the DTN environment. Using simulations, we rst analyze the inuence of the ACO operators and CA knowledge on the CGrAnt performance. We then compare the performance of CGrAnt with the PROPHET and Epidemic protocols under varying networking parameters. The results show that CGrAnt achieves the highest delivery ratio (gains of 99.12% compared with PROPHET and 40.21% compared with Epidemic) and the lowest message replication (63.60% lower than PROPHET and 60.84% lower than Epidemic)

In Vivo Evaluation of the Secure Opportunistic Schemes Middleware using a Delay Tolerant Social Network

Over the past decade, online social networks (OSNs) such as Twitter and Facebook have thrived and experienced rapid growth to over 1 billion users. A major evolution would be to leverage the characteristics of OSNs to evaluate the effectiveness of the many routing schemes developed by the research community in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we showcase the Secure Opportunistic Schemes (SOS) middleware which allows different routing schemes to be easily implemented relieving the burden of security and connection establishment. The feasibility of creating a delay tolerant social network is demonstrated by using SOS to power AlleyOop Social, a secure delay tolerant networking research platform that serves as a real-life mobile social networking application for iOS devices. SOS and AlleyOop Social allow users to interact, publish messages, and discover others that share common interests in an intermittent network using Bluetooth, peer-to-peer WiFi, and infrastructure WiFi.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, accepted in ICDCS 2017. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1702.0565

SocialDTN: A DTN implementation for Digital and Social Inclusion

Despite of the importance of access to computers and to the Internet for the development of people and their inclusion in society, there are people that still suffer with digital divide and social exclusion. Delay/Disruption-Tolerant Networking (DTN) can help the digital/social inclusion of these people as it allows opportunistic and asynchronous communication, which does not depend upon networking infrastructure. We introduce SocialDTN, an implementation of the DTN architecture for Android devices that operates over Bluetooth, taking advantages of the social daily routines of users. As we want to exploit the social proximity and interactions existing among users, SocialDTN includes a social-aware opportunistic routing proposal, dLife, instead of the well-known (but social-oblivious) PROPHET. Simulations show the potential of dLife for our needs. Additionally, some preliminary results from field experimentations are presented.Comment: 3 pages, 4 figure

Social-Aware Forwarding Improves Routing Performance in Pocket Switched Networks

Several social-aware forwarding strategies have been recently introduced in opportunistic networks, and proved effective in considerably in- creasing routing performance through extensive simulation studies based on real-world data. However, this performance improvement comes at the expense of storing a considerable amount of state information (e.g, history of past encounters) at the nodes. Hence, whether the benefits on routing performance comes directly from the social-aware forwarding mechanism, or indirectly by the fact state information is exploited is not clear. Thus, the question of whether social-aware forwarding by itself is effective in improving opportunistic network routing performance remained unaddressed so far. In this paper, we give a first, positive answer to the above question, by investigating the expected message delivery time as the size of the net- work grows larger