A novel socially-aware opportunistic routing algorithm in mobile social networks

Routing in disconnected delay-tolerant mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) continues to be a challenging issue. Several works have been done to address the routing issues using the social behaviors of each node. Yet, these algorithms rely purely on the mobility models without considering the social network characteristics. In this paper, we introduce the social relations and profiles among nodes as the key metrics, and our objective is to compute the best forwarding node in routing such that the packet delivery probability is maximized. We propose the Social Relation Opportunistic Routing (SROR) distributed protocol to solve the routing issue based on these metrics. Our results demonstrate the performance of our proposed algorithm through simulation, and we validate it with experiments using ns-2 compared with other existing benchmark methods. © 2013 IEEE.