Opportunistic routing using prefix ordering and self-reported social groups

We present a new approach for opportunistic information dissemination. In contrast to prior approaches to disruption-tolerant networking that focus on physical aspects of connectivity, our approach is based on exploiting the social plane to improve the efficiency with which the physical network infrastructure is used. We integrate the use of social-group information with an approach to routing that eliminates the use of destination-based routing tables. We show that our approach provides correct unicast routing, and compare its performance against that of epidemic routing and an disruption-tolerant, address-based routing scheme. The results from our simulation experiments illustrate that eliminating flooding in connected components of a network and using the social plane to guide information dissemination render substantial performance improvements over traditional methods for routing in disruption-tolerant networks.