Social profile-based multicast routing scheme for delay-tolerant networks

By leveraging node mobility and exploring a store-carry-and-forward paradigm, delay-tolerant networking enables and assists end-to-end message delivery in many scenarios, e.g., vehicular ad hoc networks and mobile social networks. Most existing work in the literature either focuses on the routing strategies for unicast, or history-based routing for multicast communications. In this paper, we discover the most important and independent social features from the Infocom 06 trace data, and propose a social profile-based multicast routing scheme. Our proposed scheme reduces the delivery cost greatly compared with flooding-based schemes and achieves a similar performance to the history-based schemes, without the cost of maintaining the contact history. The efficiency of the proposed scheme has been confirmed by trace-driven simulation, which also reflects the efficacy of exploring social features in delay-tolerant networks.