Social-based routing with congestion avoidance in opportunistic networks

Abstract

In particular types of Delay-Tolerant Networks (DTN) such as Opportunistic Mobile Networks, node connectivity is transient. For this reason, traditional routing mechanisms are no longer suitable. New approaches use social relations between mobile users as a criterion for the routing process. We argue that in such an approach, nodes with high social popularity may become congested. We show that social-based routing algorithms such as Bubble Rap are prone to congestion, and introduce two algorithms Outer and LowerEps. We present experimental results showing that the latter outperform Bubble Rap and solve the congestion problem. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.