Social-aware Backbone-based Multicast Routing in Mobile Opportunistic Networks

Mobile opportunistic networks (MONs) provide an efficient way for communication when there is no persistent connection between nodes. Compared to unicast routing schemes that have been extensively studied in MONs, multicast is an important communication technology in many realistic application scenarios that require to send data to multiple destination nodes, but it still lacks sufficient research. Most of the existing multicast routing schemes fail to consider the heterogeneity of nodes' capacities and resources. To address this issue, we propose a hierarchical multicast scheme in MONs by exploiting a backbone from a social network perspective. Firstly, we use the contact information between nodes to derive a weighted network contact graph. The weights of nodes and edges reflect the importance of nodes for relaying messages and the tightness of contacts between nodes, which are from a social network perspective. Secondly, we use the derived weighted graph to construct a backbone. Thirdly, we present a novel multicast algorithm by using the generated mobile backbone. Finally, we conduct extensive simulations based on real human contact datasets and the results show that our proposed social-aware backbone-based multicast routing scheme can effectively reduce the network overhead and energy consumption.