Social-Aware Routing in Mobile Opportunistic Networks

Mobile Opportunistic Networks (MONs) are characterized by the lack of continuous end-to-end connectivity between two nodes due to node mobility, sparse deployment, and constrained resources. In order to fulfill ubiquitous communication requirements of them, social-aware routing, which exploits social ties and behaviors among nodes to make forwarding decisions, has been proposed and already become a promising approach to enable data delivery in MONs. In this article, we present an insightful review of social-aware routing in MONs through thorough investigations to provide a comprehensive understanding and inspire more in-depth studies. We first explore the motivations behind social-aware routing and introduce various social metrics commonly used. Then we investigate existing social-aware routing schemes in terms of design principles, evaluation metrics, taxonomy, relay selection and message distribution, respectively. Finally, we outline emerging challenges and open issues with respect to social metrics, social perception, privacy and security, emerging applications and experiments in this area.