Relative interpersonal-influence-aware routing in buffer constrained Delay-Tolerant Networks

In Delay-Tolerant Networks, the existence of social selfishness results in different levels of willingness to forward the packet from acquaintances and strangers. The traditional social selfishness is defined solely by the social ties between node pairs to indicate the preference for packet delivery. However, the absolute value of social ties cannot accurately model the competition among friends when the storage resources become scarce. Thus, if the social selfishness exists in the buffer management, the traditional social ties cannot reflect the willingness for saving the packet when buffer overflows. To address this issue, we take the relay's social ties with all other nodes into account and introduce the definition of interpersonal influence as a metric for the willingness to save packets in buffer management. Furthermore, based on the interpersonal influence we estimate the overall delivery probability and further propose a multi-copy routing protocol to reduce the occurrence of packet dropping. Simulation result based on real trace INFOCOM06 demonstrates the efficiency of our scheme.