# Routing in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks using Social Tie Strengths and Mobility Plans

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a routing method for mobile ad-hoc networks that leverages mobility plans and social tie strengths to improve reliability and throughput, outperforming traditional protocols like OLSR especially under high mobility.

## Contribution

The paper presents a novel routing algorithm that combines mobility plans and social tie metrics, enhancing performance over existing protocols in MANETs with partial mobility knowledge.

## Key findings

- Proposed routing outperforms OLSR in throughput and reliability.
- The approach is more effective under high mobility conditions.
- Increased overhead is justified by improved performance.

## Abstract

We consider the problem of routing in a mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) for which the planned mobilities of the nodes are partially known a priori and the nodes travel in groups. This situation arises commonly in military and emergency response scenarios. Optimal routes are computed using the most reliable path principle in which the negative logarithm of a node pair's adjacency probability is used as a link weight metric. This probability is estimated using the mobility plan as well as dynamic information captured by table exchanges, including a measure of the social tie strength between nodes. The latter information is useful when nodes deviate from their plans or when the plans are inaccurate. We compare the proposed routing algorithm with the commonly-used optimized link state routing (OLSR) protocol in ns-3 simulations. As the OLSR protocol does not exploit the mobility plans, it relies on link state determination which suffers with increasing mobility. Our simulations show considerably better throughput performance with the proposed approach as compared with OLSR at the expense of increased overhead. However, in the high-throughput regime, the proposed approach outperforms OLSR in terms of both throughput and overhead.