PIS: A Multi-dimensional Routing Protocol for Socially-aware Networking

TL;DR

This paper introduces PIS, a multi-dimensional routing protocol for socially-aware networks that leverages social features like proximity, interests, and relationships to improve data delivery efficiency.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel multi-dimensional routing protocol that integrates social features into a unified distance metric for better data forwarding in social networks.

Findings

PIS outperforms Epidemic, PROPHET, and SimBet in data delivery ratio.

PIS achieves lower communication overhead compared to benchmarks.

The protocol effectively utilizes social features to enhance routing performance.

Abstract

Socially-aware networking is an emerging paradigm for intermittently connected networks consisting of mobile users with social relationships and characteristics. In this setting, humans are the main carriers of mobile devices. Hence, their connections, social features, and behaviors can be exploited to improve the performance of data forwarding protocols. In this paper, we first explore the impact of three social features, namely physical proximity, user interests, and social relationship on users' daily routines. Then, we propose a multi-dimensional routing protocol called Proximity-Interest-Social (PIS) protocol in which the three different social dimensions are integrated into a unified distance function in order to select optimal intermediate data carriers. PIS protocol utilizes a time slot management mechanism to discover users' movement similarities in different time periods during a day. We compare the performance of PIS to Epidemic, PROPHET, and SimBet routing protocols using SIGCOMM09 and INFOCOM06 data sets. The experiment results show that PIS outperforms other benchmark routing protocols with the highest data delivery ratio with a low communication overhead.