A social overlay-based forwarding scheme for mobile social networks

In mobile social networks, forwarding is a challenging problem since there may be no end-to-end paths. Existing schemes using overlays are not applicable to pure mobile social networks since they use environments different from the mobile social networks. To resolve this problem, we propose a novel forwarding scheme that considers the common neighbor similarity and contact probability. In the proposed scheme, the more nodes have in common, the more likely they are to be friends, and higher contact probabilities between nodes increase the chances they will arrive at the destination. The proposed scheme constructs an overlay using two layers with the common neighbor similarity and the contact probability and forwards messages to the destinations through the overlay. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme outperforms most known forwarding schemes in terms of balancing the network traffic and transmission delay.