Regular routine aware routing in opportunistic mobile social networks

Abstract

Due to intermittent connectivity, routing protocols in opportunistic mobile social networks (OMSN) forward messages through opportunistic contacts. Previous opportunistic routing protocols focus on the past contact history of nodes to make a forwarding decision. It was found that predicting temporally evolving contacts and communities according to different times of the day would improve the accuracy of the prediction. In this paper, a routing paradigm called RRoutine is proposed that allows message holders to exchange multiple copies of the message based on the predicted number of communities. This distribution continues until the remaining copies of the message become one. Each message holder applies either inter or intra‐community forwarding and selects a set of potential forwarders based on the prediction of future encounters in the community and an expected remaining duration between two nodes (ERIMD). The estimation of ERIMD takes into account the sequence of daily activities, the time scale of current activities, and the return time to regular meetings of the nodes. Also, unlike traditional routing, where a single forwarder is selected, a set of potential candidates is selected and prioritized according to their contact prediction, with the most likely candidate receiving the highest priority. Simulation results obtained from synthetic and real mobility data show that the proposed paper improves the performance of the system in terms of message delivery rate, throughput, and latency.