Routing through an integrated communication and social network

This paper explores the robust routing of messages among individuals. Traditional routing assumes individuals provide messages to a device connected to a communications network that assumes all responsibility for message delivery. Although each individual may have links to multiple communication devices (office computer, PDA, cell phone), messages are delivered only if there is an end-to-end communication path between communication devices available to each individual. To improve robustness of communication, especially in dynamic ad hoc military networks, this paper models a novel routing paradigm using an integrated communication and social network. The understanding is that individuals can and do route messages through a social network in conjunction with the communication network. An example of this is an individual asking another in his immediate social network to place a call on his behalf when the official communication system is not convenient or is unavailable. We show that it is possible to route messages through the integrated social and communication network by: a) using the ORA social analysis tool to select normalized costs for the social and communication network links (e.g., to reflect the link delay, quality or robustness), and b) using the MONOPATI communication design tool to model the integrated socio-communication network as a graph and performing QoS routing. Results show that the robustness of message delivery can be improved by 5X through this joint routing, without unnecessary impacts on end to end latency.