Interest-aware content distribution protocol for mobile disruption-tolerant networks

Most of the routing protocols for mobile disruption-tolerant networks (DTNs), are designed to route data from a single source to a single destination. Many real-world applications, however, need to transfer data to a group of recipients rather than individuals. Proposed architectures for multicast communication in mobile DTNs rely on a global knowledge of multicast group memberships that makes them infeasible for infrastructure-less networks. Our interest-aware data distribution protocol distributes data among a community of mobile users in DTNs based on their interests. Our interest-aware algorithm automatically learns users´ interests from the history of their cached data and provides them with their preferred data content. We implemented this protocol in the ONE simulator and evaluated its performance using reality-mining mobile traces. Our simulations show that our protocol delivers 30% more relevant data to mobile users´ interests than epidemic routing. Furthermore, this superior performance is achieved with 35% lower distribution of irrelevant data content among mobile users.