Abstract. This paper proposes the HURRy (HUman Routines used for Routing) protocol, which infers and benefits from the social behaviour of nodes in disruptive networking environments. HURRy incorporates the contact duration to the information retrieved from historical encounters among neighbours, so that smarter routing decisions can be made. The specification of HURRy is based on the outcomes of a thorough experiment, which highlighted the importance of distinguishing between short and long contacts and deriving mathematical relations in order to optimally prioritize the available routes to a destination. HURRy introduces a novel and more meaningful rating system to evaluate the quality of each contact and overcome the limitations of other routing approaches in social environments.

In this article, we study the asymptotic behavior of flooding in large scale wireless networks. Specifically, we derive an upper bound on the coverage of flooding when the number of nodes n in the network goes to infinity. We consider two different regimes of transmission radii: first, the case of constant transmission radius r where the percentage of covered nodes scales as O(nr 2 e −K S nr 2 ) for a constant K S > 0. In this case, as an important result, we observe that the percentage of covered nodes is upper bounded by a decreasing function, vanishing as the network size grows. Second, the case of vanishing r n (i.e., r decreases as n increases) is considered where it is shown in the literature that the minimum value of r n which maintains connectivity is log n/π n. In this case, a coverage percentage of at most O(n −K S log n) is expected for a constant value of K S > 0, leading to an infinite number of covered nodes. In such case, the rate at which the network coverage is decreased can be controlled and be considerably reduced by a proper choice of network parameters (K S ). Consequently, this result shows that flooding is a suitable strategy even for large networks.