Title: Social-awareness in opportunistic networking

Authors: Radu-Ioan Ciobanu; Ciprian Dobre

Addresses: Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers, University Politehnica of Bucharest, Bucharest 060042, Romania ' Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers, University Politehnica of Bucharest, Bucharest 060042, Romania

Abstract: Since uninterrupted connectivity has become such an important part of everyday life, the amount of energy consumed by the various devices used has increased considerably. We propose a way to limit this consumption by employing opportunistic networks, which are mainly composed of mobile devices that have no need for a static network infrastructure. They communicate when in range, using a store-carry-and-forward paradigm. We believe that opportunistic networks can be deployed in closed environments if there is a certainty that messages sent in the network eventually reach their destination. Therefore, we propose the addition of social data to existing opportunistic routing algorithms. We investigate our approach using two traces collected in different environments and we present an analysis of our findings. Most importantly, we show that by adding knowledge such as social links between participants, the performance of the opportunistic network can be improved.

Keywords: opportunistic networking; online social data; tracing; power reduction; energy efficiency; social awareness; mobile devices; opportunistic routing algorithms.

DOI: 10.1504/IJISTA.2013.055095

International Journal of Intelligent Systems Technologies and Applications, 2013 Vol.12 No.1, pp.39 - 62

Received: 26 Oct 2012
Accepted: 04 Apr 2013
Published online: 02 Feb 2014 *

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