Social-aware Forwarding in Opportunistic Wireless Networks: Content Awareness or Obliviousness?

With the current host-based Internet architecture, networking faces limitations in dynamic scenarios, due mostly to host mobility. The ICN paradigm mitigates such problems by releasing the need to have an end-to-end transport session established during the life time of the data transfer. Moreover, the ICN concept solves the mismatch between the Internet architecture and the way users would like to use it: currently a user needs to know the topological location of the hosts involved in the communication when he/she just wants to get the data, independently of its location. Most of the research efforts aim to come up with a stable ICN architecture in fixed networks, with few examples in ad-hoc and vehicular networks. However, the Internet is becoming more pervasive with powerful personal mobile devices that allow users to form dynamic networks in which content may be exchanged at all times and with low cost. Such pervasive wireless networks suffer with different levels of disruption given user mobility, physical obstacles, lack of cooperation, intermittent connectivity, among others. This paper discusses the combination of content knowledge (e.g., type and interested parties) and social awareness within opportunistic networking as to drive the deployment of ICN solutions in disruptive networking scenarios. With this goal in mind, we go over few examples of social-aware content-based opportunistic networking proposals that consider social awareness to allow content dissemination independently of the level of network disruption. To show how much content knowledge can improve social-based solutions, we illustrate by means of simulation some content-oblivious/oriented proposals in scenarios based on synthetic mobility patterns and real human traces.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure

Infocast: A New Paradigm for Collaborative Content Distribution from Roadside Units to Vehicular Networks Using Rateless Codes

In this paper, we address the problem of distributing a large amount of bulk data to a sparse vehicular network from roadside infostations, using efficient vehicle-to-vehicle collaboration. Due to the highly dynamic nature of the underlying vehicular network topology, we depart from architectures requiring centralized coordination, reliable MAC scheduling, or global network state knowledge, and instead adopt a distributed paradigm with simple protocols. In other words, we investigate the problem of reliable dissemination from multiple sources when each node in the network shares a limited amount of its resources for cooperating with others. By using \emph{rateless} coding at the Road Side Unit (RSU) and using vehicles as data carriers, we describe an efficient way to achieve reliable dissemination to all nodes (even disconnected clusters in the network). In the nutshell, we explore vehicles as mobile storage devices. We then develop a method to keep the density of the rateless codes packets as a function of distance from the RSU at the desired level set for the target decoding distance. We investigate various tradeoffs involving buffer size, maximum capacity, and the mobility parameter of the vehicles

A Reliable and Efficient Encounter-Based Routing Framework for Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networks

This article addresses Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) routing under a highly dynamic scenario, envisioned for communication in Vehicular Sensor Networks (VSNs) suffering from intermittent connection. Here, we focus on the design of a high level routing framework, rather than the dedicated encounter prediction. Based on an analyzed utility metric to predict nodal encounter, our proposed routing framework considers the following three cases: 1) Messages are efficiently replicated to a better qualified candidate node, based on the analysed utility metric related to destination. 2) Messages are conditionally replicated if the node with a better utility metric has not been met. 3) Messages are probabilistically replicated if the information in relation to destination is unavailable in the worst case. With this framework in mind, we propose two routing schemes covering two major technique branches in literature, namely Encounter-Based Replication Routing (EBRR) and Encounter-Based Spraying Routing (EBSR). Results under the scenario applicable to VSNs show that, in addition to achieving high delivery ratio for reliability, our schemes are more efficient in terms of a lower overhead ratio. Our core investigation indicates that apart from what information to use for encounter prediction, how to deliver messages based on the given utility metric is also important