Social aspects to support opportunistic networks in an academic environment

Abstract

As wireless and 3G networks become more crowded, users with mobile devices have difficulties in accessing the network. Opportunistic networks, created between mobile phones using local peer-to-peer connections, have the potential to solve such problems by dispersing some of the traffic to neighboring smartphones. Recently various opportunistic routing or dissemination algorithms were proposed and evaluated in different scenarios emulating real-world phenomena as close as possible. In this paper we present an experiment performed at the Politehnica University of Bucharest in which we collected social and mobiltity data to evaluate opportunistic routing and dissemination algorithms. We present an analysis of our findings, highlighting key social and mobility behavior factors that can influence such opportunistic solutions. Most importantly, we show that by adding knowledge such as social links between participants in an opportunistic network routing and dissemination algorithms can be greatly improved. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.