How Small Labels Create Big Improvements

It is widely believed that identifying communities in an ad hoc mobile communications system, such as a pocket switched network, can reduce the amount of traffic created when forwarding messages, but there has not been any empirical evidence available to support this assumption to date. In this paper, we show through use of real experimental human mobility data, how using a small label, identifying users according to their affiliation, can bring a large improvement in forwarding performance, in term of both delivery ratio and cost