Practical Routing Protocol for Impromptu Mobile Social Networks

With the popularity of mobile devices, mobile social networks (MSNs) formed by people carrying mobile devices moving around and contacting each other have become a hot research topic these days. In this paper, we study a specific kind of MSNs that is formed impromptu (e.g. when people carrying mobile devices gather at some social events). We refer to them as Impromptu Mobile Social Networks (IMSNs). Due to the dynamic nature of such networks, routing poses special challenges. The existing social-based MSN routing algorithms that take advantage of stable social relationships or social features of people in the network may not be suitable for IMSNs. Thus, new routing algorithms that can catch node contact behavior need to be designed for IMSNs. We first propose two statistical-based theoretical routing algorithms named BerRout and PoiRout inspired by the node contact models in several papers and then put forward a practical routing algorithm UpDown which makes routing decisions based on a simple Counter capturing the ups and downs of people's relationships formed in an IMSN. We compare our algorithms with the existing social-based MSN routing algorithms by simulations. The results show that the practical algorithm performs close to the two theoretical ones and all of our proposed algorithms outperform the existing ones in terms of performance versus cost in an IMSN environment.