Social-Aware Forwarding Improves Routing Performance in Pocket Switched Networks

TL;DR

This paper investigates whether social-aware forwarding strategies inherently improve routing performance in pocket switched networks, independent of state information, by analyzing message delivery times as network size increases.

Contribution

It provides the first analysis confirming that social-aware forwarding alone effectively reduces message delivery time in large opportunistic networks.

Findings

Social-aware forwarding improves routing performance.

Performance benefits persist as network size increases.

Effectiveness is independent of stored encounter history.

Abstract

Several social-aware forwarding strategies have been recently introduced in opportunistic networks, and proved effective in considerably in- creasing routing performance through extensive simulation studies based on real-world data. However, this performance improvement comes at the expense of storing a considerable amount of state information (e.g, history of past encounters) at the nodes. Hence, whether the benefits on routing performance comes directly from the social-aware forwarding mechanism, or indirectly by the fact state information is exploited is not clear. Thus, the question of whether social-aware forwarding by itself is effective in improving opportunistic network routing performance remained unaddressed so far. In this paper, we give a first, positive answer to the above question, by investigating the expected message delivery time as the size of the net- work grows larger.