Social Network Analysis Concepts in the Design of Wireless Ad Hoc Network Protocols

This article presents a survey of ad hoc networking protocols that have used concepts such as centrality metrics and community formation from the area of social network analysis, which is seen as a network measurement task that deals with structural properties of the network graph. We recognize the synergy among social network analysis and ad hoc networking as a fertile research area that can provide significant advances for the design of network protocols, especially in environments where the communication is opportunistic in nature and therefore cannot be easily or efficiently described as an optimization problem, and other systematic approaches like cross-layer optimization are more difficult to apply.