Title: A social similarity-aware multicast routing protocol in delay tolerant networks

Authors: Xia Deng; Jianxin Wang; Yao Liu; Le Chang

Addresses: School of Information Science and Engineering, Central South University, Changsha, 410083, Hunan, China; School of Computer Science and Education Software, Guangzhou University, Guangzhou, 510006, Guangdong, China ' School of Information Science and Engineering, Central South University, Changsha, 410083, Hunan, China ' School of Information Science and Engineering, Central South University, Changsha, 410083, Hunan, China; School of Computer and Information Engineering, Hunan University of Commerce, Changsha, 410205, Hunan, China ' Department of Computer Science, University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, V8W 2Y2, Canada

Abstract: In delay tolerant networks (DTNs), multicast is widely adopted for emergency notifications in crisis environment and data scattering under military rescue situations, as it has better robustness and resource utilisation. Although the topology of DTNs usually changes quickly, they also demonstrate relatively stable social characteristics, e.g., the social similarity. In this paper, a social similarity-aware multicast routing protocol (SSM) is proposed, in which the social similarity is quantified as the probability of the encounter of two nodes in the future based on the number of common neighbours in the history. We propose and evaluate four measuring metrics (i.e., max, min, average and median) on such probability in multicast scenarios, and nodes with higher such similarity metrics are selected in priority to construct the forwarding group during the data replication process. Simulation results show that SSM can effectively improve the data delivery ratio and reduce the overhead at the same time.

Keywords: delay tolerant networks; DTNs; social characteristics; social similarity; multicast routing protocol; data replication; simulation; data delivery ratio; overhead reduction.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSPM.2013.059428

International Journal of Simulation and Process Modelling, 2013 Vol.8 No.4, pp.248 - 256

Received: 17 Oct 2013
Accepted: 01 Dec 2013
Published online: 29 Jul 2014 *

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