Privacy and Node Cooperation in Mobile Social Networks

A mobile social network (MSN) is defined as a mobile network that uses social relationships to determine node communication. There has been extensive research on routing protocols for MSNs. These protocols assume cooperating nodes carry messages to the destination nodes. However, since these protocols employ social relationships to facilitate communication between nodes, node cooperation may be limited due to privacy concerns. Thus, a privacy strategy is proposed here for MSN routing protocols. Performance results are presented which show that this approach leads to greater node cooperation and thus a better probability of delivery.