Socio-geo: Social network routing protocol in delay tolerant networks

Social based routing has emerged as one of the most efficient routing solutions for Delay Tolerant Networks. It opportunistically relays data to more sociable nodes that have a higher probability of meeting the destination. Many researchers have tried to find the most appropriate metrics that can reflect the real world, such as frequency, freshness, and/or centrality. However, these metrics are mainly used to represent sociality between nodes without considering the actual social relationship between people. In this paper, we propose a novel social network routing protocol that exploits the human friendship information in order to perform routing. First, by collecting data from online social network services, we generated a new dataset trace that includes real social relation information in addition to users' mobility patterns. With the geolocation information that incorporates social relationship information, our protocol can improve the probability estimate of encountering destinations and deliver data packets.