On balancing the energy consumption of routing protocols for opportunistic social networks

Routing protocols for opportunistic social network (OSN) utilize popular nodes to achieve good routing performance with low overhead. This, however, may result in a severe energy consumption imbalance. The existence of Transient Connected Components (TCC) further complicates the problem due to the randomness of TCC´s topology. This paper investigates the energy consumption imbalance problem in OSNs with TCCs. We show that TCC-aware routing protocols, despite their superiority in routing performance, suffer from a more severe imbalance problem. We propose an Energy Consumption Balanced Routing protocol, which includes a new metric and a routing protocol independent mechanism. We analytically show that our protocol leads to the convergence of aggregate traffic carried by each node. Through simulation on real world traces, we show that our protocol reduces the energy imbalance by up to 31%, while maintaining comparable routing performance, and that our protocol independent mechanism balances the energy consumption of existing OSN routing protocols.