Nowadays, routing proposals must deal with a panoply of heterogeneous devices, intermittent connectivity, and the users’ constant need for communication, even in rather challenging networking scenarios. Thus, we propose a Social-aware Content-based Opportunistic Routing Protocol, SCORP, that considers the users’ social interaction and their interests to improve data delivery in urban, dense scenarios. Through simulations, using synthetic mobility and human traces scenarios, we compare the performance of our solution against other two social-aware solutions, dLife and Bubble Rap, and the social-oblivious Spray and Wait, in order to show that the combination of social awareness and content knowledge can be beneficial when disseminating data in challenged networks.
Routing in opportunistic networks must be capable of dealing with occasional contacts, intermittent connectivity, highly mobile nodes, power and storage-constrained devices, and the possible nonexistence of end-to-end paths. In the last couple of years, different social-aware opportunistic routing solutions have emerged @cite_8 trying to exploit the less volatile graph created by social proximity metrics in relation to metrics reflecting the mobility behavior of nodes.
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Since users move around based on social relationships and interests, their movement patterns represent how nodes are socially connected (i.e., nodes with strong social ties, nodes that meet occasionally by sharing the same working environment). This means that social interactions reflect personal relationships (e.g., family, friends, co-workers, and passers-by) that may be translated into statistical contact opportunities within and between social groups over time. Such contact opportunities may be exploited to ensure good data dissemination and retrieval, even in the presence of intermittent connectivity. Thus, in the last years, a new routing trend based on social similarity emerged where social relationships, interests, popularity, and among other social characteristics are used to improve opportunistic routing (i.e., routing able to take advantage on intermittent contacts). In this chapter, the reader will learn about the different approaches related to opportunistic routing, focusing on social-aware approaches, and how such approaches make use of social information derived from opportunistic contacts to improve data forwarding. Additionally, a brief overview on the existing taxonomies for opportunistic routing as well as a new one, based on the new social trend, are provided along with a set of experiments in scenarios based on synthetic mobility models and human traces to show the potential of social-aware solutions.