An improved congestion control algorithm based on social awareness in delay tolerant networks

The routing efficiency in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN) with social characteristics degrades owing to intermittent connection and high latency. Additionally, congestion is another issue because of the limited resources of nodes. To solve these problems, an improved Socially Aware Congestion Control algorithm (SACC) is proposed. In this algorithm, the social features and the congestion level of the node are utilized to construct a Social Congestion Metric (SCM). In the forwarding process, messages are forwarded to the nodes with higher SCM. When the congestion occurs, the node calculates the social links of itself with every message's destination node, and then drops the message with minimum social link rather than random dropping. Simulation results show that in the acceptable range of delay tolerance, the proposed algorithm improves the delivery probability, decreases the dropping probability and reduces the overhead.