Mobility profile based routing within intermittently connected mobile ad hoc networks (ICMAN)

Routing in Intermittently Connected Networks (ICN) is a challenging problem due to the time varying nature of network connectivity. In this work, we focus on a special class of ICN formed by mobile ad hoc users called ICMAN. A recent study of wireless users' mobility traces revealed that users usually move between a small set of socially significant places called "hubs" to form so-called "sociological orbits" [6]. To exploit the knowledge about such mobility profiles, we propose a hub-level routing method, and two versions of user-level routing methods. We compare these approaches with Epidemic routing [21] to highlight the advantages of sociological orbit aware routing within ICMAN in terms of achieving a higher throughput and a lower overhead.