The effect of communication pattern on opportunistic mobile networks

Social-based forwarding algorithms provide a new perspective on the study of routing in opportunistic mobile networks, and all of these schemes assume a uniform pattern for message generating rule. However, this is unconvincing due to the heterogeneity of contact rates in human communication patterns. In this paper we propose three social-based communication pattern models and utilize them to evaluate the network performance of different social-based routing protocols based on several human mobility traces. We find that communication patterns could significantly affect the network performance and the influence degree largely depends on the social metrics which these communication patterns are based on. We contend that considering communication pattern is quite important for designing a practical routing algorithm in opportunistic mobile networks.