A venues-aware message routing scheme for delay-tolerant networks

With their proliferation and increasing capabilities, mobile devices with local wireless interfaces can be organized into delay-tolerant networks (DTNs) that exploit communication opportunities arising out of the movement of their users. As the mobile devices are usually carried by people, these DTNs can also be viewed as social networks. Unfortunately, most existing routing algorithms for DTNs rely on relatively simple mobility models that rarely consider these social network characteristics, and therefore, the mobility models in these algorithms cannot accurately describe users' real mobility traces. In this paper, we propose two predict and spread (PreS) message routing algorithms for DTNs. We employ an adapted Markov chain to model a node's mobility pattern and capture its social characteristics. A comparison with state-of-the-art algorithms demonstrates that PreS can yield better performance in terms of delivery ratio and delivery latency, and it can provide a comparable performance with the epidemic routing algorithm with lower resource consumption. Copyright (C) 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.