A novel social-based clustering and routing scheme in mobile opportunistic networks

In this paper, we take a real-life example to show that social relationship among nodes consists of explicit and implicit parts. Explicit social relationship comes from direct contact among nodes, and implicit social relationship can be measured through the "circle of friends". Based on effective measurement of social relationship, we propose a novel social-based clustering and routing scheme. Each node selects the nodes with close social relationship to form a local cluster, and self-control method is used to keep all cluster members always having close relationship with each other. Cluster-based message forwarding mechanism is designed for opportunistic routing, in which each node only forwards the copy of the message to nodes with the destination node as a member of local cluster. Simulation results show that the proposed social-based clustering and routing outperforms the other two classic routing algorithms.