Impact of Social Features on the Performance of Pocket Switched Network

The forwarding activities of Pocket Switched Network (PSN) under social scene has attracted increasing attention, which are deeply affected by the social features of PSN nodes, especially the social network structure and characteristics of selfishness among nodes that jointly construct their behavior model under an opportunistic forwarding environment. Through both analysis and simulation, we investigate how social network structure and node selfishness influence data forwarding activities of PSN nodes based on our proposed contact-and-cooperative model. Simulation results obtained by PROPHET algorithm show that PSN forwarding performance, including delay time and packet delivery ratio, are improved by the introduction of social network structure. Further, the differentiation of node selfishness according to nodes´ relationships on social structure level also displays intrinsic benefit in network performance in the presence of the node selfish behavior that is inevitable in real world. The results also show that hub nodes in the network, which undertake heavy relay mission, may play a more important role in forwarding activities under our model with social selfishness compared with unconditionally cooperative cases.