On exploiting temporal, social, and geographical relationships for data forwarding in Delay Tolerant Networks

Because of unpredictable node mobility and absence of global information in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs), effective data forwarding has become a significant challenge in such network. Currently, most of existing data forwarding mechanisms select nodes with high cumulative contact capability as forwarders. However, for the heterogeneity of the transient node contact patterns, these selection approaches may not be the best relay choices within a short time period. This paper proposes an appropriate data forwarding mechanism, which combines time, location, and social characteristics into one coordinate system, to improve the performance of data forwarding in DTNs. The Temporal-Social Relationship and the Temporal-Geographical Relationship reveal the implied connection information among these three factors. This mechanism is formulated and verified in the experimental studies of realistic DTN traces. The empirical results show that our proposed mechanism can achieve better performance compared to the existing schemes with similar forwarding costs (e.g. end-to-end delay and delivery success ratio).