Two birds, one stone: Using mobility behavioral profiles both as destinations and as a routing tool

Abstract

We present HabCast, a profile-cast communication paradigm that learns about the mobility habits of the locationaware nodes of the network and uses this information both to route the messages, and to deliver them only to the nodes that match the target behavioral profile. HabCast substitutes destination's identifier by a mobility profile model called habitat, meaning that allows users to send messages "to any nodes who usually roams around this area" instead of sending messages intended to a node. HabCast is designed to operate without network infrastructure, using Opportunistic Networking strategies and operates in three phases: approximation, floating and delivery phase. HabCast enables new services and applications on Opportunistic Networking by automatically inferring the nodes' behavioral profiles and using them to define the messages' destinations. The overhead introduced by HabCast is evaluated using a proof-of-concept implementation, and its performance and feasibility is studied, through simulation, under the scope of a real carsharing application.