VIRO: A virtual routing method for eliminating dead end in Opportunistic Mobile Social Network

Opportunistic Mobile Social Networks (MSNs) as a kind of social network in which nodes are opportunistically connected. Many data routing strategies have been proposed for opportunistic MSNs. Most of them apply a utility for relay selection that a node with a higher utility value is selected as relay. However, such utility-based routing strategies run into dead end problem in which the data is stuck into a node with local maximal utility value. In this paper, we propose a virtual routing method named VIRO, which exerts conformal mapping to convert the local topology of dead end into a virtual geometric map to guarantee data dissemination to the next relay. We first convert the utility into geometric planner, and then conduct the discrete Ricci Flow bypass the gap between the dead end and next relay. Extensive experiment results suggest VIRO can reduce the ratio of dead end effectively so that the data delivery ratio is enhanced up to 42% by increasing only a slight amount of delay and cost.