Beyond contact predictions in mobile opportunistic networks

When studying and designing protocols for mobile opportunistic networks, most works consider only direct contact patterns between mobile nodes. Tracking these contacts is important for end-to-end communications but relying only on this kind of information provides a limited view about transmission possibilities. Mobile users are often in intercontact, but still separated by only a few hops, which translate into effective communication opportunities between nodes. In this paper, we focus on such a type of communication opportunities and investigate to what extent they can be predicted. Using realworld datasets, we provide evidences about the predictable nature of nodes´ proximity and evaluate the benefits of these results compared to direct contact predictions.