Exploiting Friendship Relations for Efficient Routing in Mobile Social Networks

Abstract: Routing in delay tolerant networks is a challenging problem due to the intermittent connectivity between nodes resulting in the frequent absence of end-to-end path for any source-destination pair at any given time. Recently, this problem has attracted a great deal of interest and several approaches have been proposed. Since Mobile Social Networks (MSNs) are increasingly popular type of Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs), making accurate analysis of social network properties of these networks is essential for designing efficient routing protocols. In this work, a new metric that detects the quality of friendship relations between nodes accurately is introduced. Utilizing this metric, each node defines the community of nodes having close friendship relations with it either directly or indirectly. Later Friendship-Based Routing algorithm is introduced which uses this community information in forwarding of messages. Extensive simulations show that the introduced algorithm works efficiently.

Keywords: Social Network, MSN, DTN, Routing protocols, Metrix