Know Thy Neighbor: Towards Optimal Mapping of Contacts to Social Graphs for DTN Routing

—Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN) are networks of self-organizing wireless nodes, where end-to-end connectivity is intermittent. In these networks, forwarding decisions are generally made using locally collected knowledge about node behavior (e.g., past contacts between nodes) to predict future contact opportunities. The use of complex network analysis has been recently suggested to perform this prediction task and improve the performance of DTN routing. Contacts seen in the past are aggregated to a social graph, and a variety of metrics (e.g., centrality and similarity) or algorithms (e.g., community detection) have been proposed to assess the utility of a node to deliver a content or bring it closer to the destination. In this paper, we argue that it is not so much the choice or sophistication of social metrics and algorithms that bears the most weight on performance, but rather the mapping from the mobility process generating contacts to the aggregated social graph. We first study t...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Theus Hossmann, Thrasyvoulos Spyropoulos, Franck Legendre
• Keywords: Algorithm, Communications, Complex Network Analysis, INFOCOM 2010, Performance