A Novel Social Context-Aware Data Forwarding Scheme 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. Mobile Social Networks (MSNs) are increasingly popular type of Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs). The routing performance improves when knowledge regarding the expected topology and the social context information of the networks. In this paper, we introduce a new metric for data forwarding based on social context information, in which node’s social context information is used to calculate the encounter utility between a node and destination, and the social relationship of network nodes is used to calculate the betweenness centrality utility of a node. We combine two utility functions to derive the social strength among users and their importance. We also present social context-based data forwarding algorithm for routing decision. Extensive simulations on real traces show that the introduced algorithm is more efficient than the existing algorithms.