The importance of social tie detection in socially-aware opportunistic routing

Opportunistic routing in distributed Mobile Social Networks has attracted a lot of attention from the research community recently. This attention mainly concentrates on the identification of effective social routing metrics. On the other hand, many approaches are also focusing on the detection of social ties from real world traces. This paper attempts to bridge this discrepancy, by suggesting a social network discovery beacon mechanism, able to accurately detect friendly mobile nodes. It has been noticed that the social network discovery, the metric calculation and the carrier selection are three independent stages in the socially-aware opportunistic routing procedure. Therefore, the proposed beacon mechanism can be employed in any real routing scheme. An ageing feature has also been included in the beacon mechanism, in order to provide adaptability in the dynamic conditions of the real social environment. The simulation results presented in the paper, demonstrate the relationship between accurate social tie detection and routing performance.