Socialcircle: A message forwarding technique for pocket switched networks

Changing topology and missing infrastructure makes conventional routing schemes useless. To overcome the communication problem, routing protocols ranging from contact-oblivious to contact-based have been tried for intermittently connected networks. These schemes vary highly in complexity and performance however they share the issue of non-scalability. In this paper we present a lightweight and scalable routing protocol for Pocket Switched Network (PSN) that exploits the limited social circle of a node. It belongs to the category of cluster-based routing schemes that are considered to be scalable and load balancing. Empirically it is observed that other than larger networks the scheme also behaves better than state-of-art schemes including Epidemic and PRoPHET for smaller terrestrial social networks. It is also observed that our proposed protocol - which we call as SocialCircle - outperforms both the SimBet and BubbleRap protocols with respect to latency, delivery ratio and system load measurement metrics.