Exploiting social paradigms as routing strategies in Delay Tolerant Networks: an introduction

Claudio Fiandrino
claudio.andrino@gmail.com

August 27, 2012

Abstract The article illustrates several approaches developed in literature that exploit social paradigms to improve the routing in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs). Moreover, it gives an overview on the mobility models adopted, focusing the attention to those ones useful in opportunistic networks.

Contents
1 Motivations 2 The strategies developed 2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . 2.2 The analysis . . . . . . . . 2.2.1 Mobility models . 2.2.2 Routing strategies Bibliography 1 2 2 2 2 3 5

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Motivations

The application of social paradigms to DTNs it is a very well known concept in literature and researchers largely explored this eld by developing a lot of different algorithms and strategies. The basic idea behind all, is to exploit social relations to identify human mobility patterns; as result, socially-aware algorithms achieve better performances than non-socially-aware algorithms since to spread the information by means of social paradigms allow to be fast (thus latency is reduced) and

to increase the delivery ratio with a lower cost (in terms of the number of message replicas). The detection of human mobility pattern is a fundamental part since it has been noticed that people tend to meet frequently when they have interest in common in physical places as streets, squares, conferences, etc . . . In [29] authors proved this concept by highlighting the relations between the social graph and the contact graph.

2
2.1

The strategies developed

Introduction

A survey on the various social approaches already used in literature is given in [12]: in this section, a better picture of the state of the art is provided by enhancing [12].

2.2
2.2.1

The analysis
Mobility models

Some experiments to study human relations and to build social traces were done with the help of volunteers at conferences [20] or in a campus [38]. More deeply, [38] proves that the user mobility form a network. However, this studies consider just a small number of individuals. Other studies as [33, 22, 14] rely on traces already available in the Internet that contains the contact history of taxicabs while [37] takes into account the mobility patterns of 22 341 students to efciently design aggregation algorithms. Furthermore, the Haggle Project [40] creates a DTN by connecting human mobile devices. In [36] authors propose a community model able to characterize the reallife mobility features. Based on this concept, [28] shows that the separation of people into two groups, friends and strangers, allows to improve the routing performances. Moreover, they try to address security issues and they show that people encounters have daily and weekly cycles. An improvement of this work has been shown in [42]; individuals, here, are divided into four groups: familiar, familiar stranger, friends and strangers. Similarly to [37], [9] analysed the human mobility: their contribute is the proof that the distribution of contact and inter-contact times follow a powerlaw distribution with heavy-tail. On this bases, [31] developed communitybased mobility models (CMM), showing that they present contact times and inter-contact times heavy-tailed. Another mobility model is presented in [13] and this model tries to mimic the behaviour of the average person. Founded on social networks theory, authors in [32] provide an interesting mobility model: individual are grouped together based on their social-relationship

and groups are mapped on a topographical space. They also forecast that social-relationship may change over time. How mobility models affect routing performances has been studied in [2]; the analysis is based on groups and the conclusion is that social-aware routing schemes reduces congestion and provide acceptable QoS with lower overhead. Some other studies rely on simplistic random mobility models (Random Walk, Random Way Point) and they try to address problems like: single-copy based routing algorithms [25, 21, 8, 35]; multi-copy based routing algorithms [34, 5]; erasure coding based routing algorithms (they allow the use of a large number of relays while maintaining a constant overhead) [41, 6]. However, [9] proved that these mobility models are not suitable for DTNs since they do not have heavy-tailed distributed contact times and intercontact times. A work that exploits the history of the social relations among users is [3]. The developed algorithm, HiBOp, automatically learns which are the most efcient connectivity opportunities that are based on users movement patterns. 2.2.2 Routing strategies

Now algorithms that try to detect which are the best individuals to forward the information to will be analysed. PRoPHET [24] makes routing decision based on the delivery probability, a paradigm in which last encountered are more relevant as individuals to forward the information to. Due to this reason, it is possible to claim that PRoPHET uses an indirect social metric because, usually, social-connected individuals meet themselves more frequently. SimBet [11] introduces two new paradigms: similarity and betweenness. The former measures how two nodes are socially closed each other by comparing their mutual contacts while the latter estimates the centrality of a node, that is how much it is important in the network. Bubble rap [19] uses as paradigms community and centrality: they measure the relevance of an individual locally and in a global fashion respectively. The routing strategy forecast that messages are forwarded to individuals with high global popularity until it is reached the destination community; once there, messages are forwarded to the individual with highest local popularity because it has more change to get in contact with the recipient. PeopleRank [30] takes inspiration from the famous PageRank to detect the best individual to which data is forwarded. In [17] authors proved that the performances of SimBet and Bubble rap heavily depends on the way in which the contact aggregation (mapping) has 3

been done. The same author in [18] propose a new mapping algorithm to cope previous issues that builds better contact-graphs based on concepts of spectral graph theory and unsupervised learning. SimBet, Bubble rap and PeopleRank look at the single individual; a different approach has been taken from authors of [7]: they consider the average inter-meeting times between groups of nodes. Other community-based approaches are DelQue [15] and [23] in which authors present a distributed algorithm, LocalCom, that utilizes local information to detect communities. Moreover, they developed two schemes able to facilitate the forwarding by control the redundancy of gateway that connect communities. SimBet, Bubble rap and LocalCom are unicast algorithms. A multicast one has been proposed by [16]. Another algorithm is SMART [39]: it bases its own forwarding strategy on the so called travel companions, individuals that more frequently meet the destination. In the rst phase, a xed number of copies of the message are injected in the network destined to a travel companion and in the second phase, the travel companion forwards the message to the destination (if met) or to a xed number of other travel companions. In [4] authors introduce a different routing algorithm. They dened a new social metric that does not rely on the encounter frequency, total or average contact period, but it takes into account contemporaneously the following features: frequency, longevity and regularity. Friendship, therefore, is ensured when two individuals get in contact with frequently, for a long period each time and regularly. Notice that frequency and regularity here are different: two individuals that get in contact with regularly during months, but unfrequently (once a month for example) should still be considered friends (in a weaker fashion). The three properties form the so called Social Pressure Metric (SPM): it measure how much an individual is motivated to share contents with others. In [10] is proposed SocialCast, an interest-based routing algorithm. The basic paradigm is publish/subscribing: the publisher simply inject the message into the network and it will be delivered just to nodes that previously declared to be interested in (subscription phase). The algorithm relies on the fact that socially-related people tend to be co-located regularly and this allows to make reasonable predictions to select good carries. This approach allows to infer a one-to-many communication paradigm without extracting community ties among the individuals. SocialCast allows, with a small number of replicas in the system, to achieve a very high delivery ratio by keeping the same network trafc of a non-predictive algorithm. Still related to the publish/subscribing paradigm are Still related to the publish/subscribing paradigm are [43], [44] and [26]. Another work of this kind and that exploits social relationship to transmit messages is [1] with the ContentPlace framework. When a node gets in 4

contact with another one, it advertises the data object it is interested in and exchanges summaries of the data object it holds. Since each object has an utility value, individuals can decide where to place their object (the publisher can decide the direction and the propagation range) such that their availability for the whole network is maximize. The above strategies are stateful strategie, that is the improvement of performances comes at the cost of knowing information like past encounters or portion of the social network graph. In [27] authors provide an approach in which they model individuals interests in m-dimensional interest space and they create individuals interest proles, that are m-dimensional vectors corresponding to a point in the interest space. The forwarding is based on the similarity of the individuals interest proles.

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