Employing Social Cooperation to Improve Data Discovery and Retrieval in Content-Centric Delay-Tolerant Networks

The paradigm of Content-Centric Networks (CCN) has been used in several networking application contexts in order to enhance the performance of data forwarding and retrieval. By disassociating device addressing from the packet routing process, CCN offers new message routing possibilities in network scenarios that are limited in this respect. An example of such scenarios concerns Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTNs), in which requesting and retrieving data and services may be even more unpredictable than simply sending any message from a source to a destination. With this in mind, we propose a DIscovery and REtrieval protocol based on Social Cooperation (DIRESC), designed specifically to perform data request and retrieval by applying the concept of CCN in the DTN scenario, an environment also known as Content-Centric Delay-Tolerant Networks (CCDTN). Our forwarding mechanism proposes the distributed sending of data based on the profile of each node, which is defined by its social interactions with other nodes. To evaluate our protocol, we used the Opportunistic Network Environment (ONE) simulator to compare DIRESC to other related CCDTN protocols, including our conceptual implementation of content-centric forwarding dubbed CCN broadcast. Results show that social cooperation has positive performance impact (i.e., improved delivery rate, delay, overhead, packet retransmission, and energy consumption) when compared to other social-oblivious CCDTN protocols.