Impact of Social Networks on Delay Tolerant Routing

Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) are wireless networks in which at any given time instance, the probability of having a complete path from a source to destination is low due to the intermittent connectivity between nodes. Several routing schemes have been proposed for such networks to make the delivery of messages possible despite the intermittent connections. In this paper, in addition to intermittent connectivity which impacts routing most strongly, we also analyze the effects of underlying social structure over the communication network. In a social network, nodes interact in diverse ways so that some nodes meet each other more frequently than others. In the paper, we first propose a new network model to reflect the underlying social structure over the network nodes, then we study the effects of this model on the performance of multi-copy based routing algorithms. We also analyze the performance of routing and validate our analysis with simulations.