Social identity-aware opportunistic routing in mobile social networks

Mobile social networks, as a type of delay-tolerant networks, are composed of nodes with different social properties in which information can be shared among them through opportunistic links. In such networks, it is important to analyze social properties of mobile nodes for transmitting information because they lack a stable source-to-destination delivery path and connect intermittently. Many social-aware routing algorithms have been proposed to address these problems. However, these algorithms fail to achieve an optimal performance since they ignored an important social property, social identity. In this paper, we propose a social identity-aware opportunistic routing algorithm by considering social identities and social influences of mobile nodes in mobile social networks. It is shown that the social identity-aware opportunistic routing algorithm substantially improves the routing performance compared with the existing algorithms according to the simulation results in 2 real-world human contact traces.