Social-Aware Stateless Routing in Pocket Switched Networks

Existing social-aware routing protocols for pocket switched networks make use of the network social structure information deduced by state information of nodes (e.g., history of past encounters) to optimize routing. Although these approaches are shown to have superior performance to social-oblivious, stateless routing protocols (BinarySW, Epidemic), the improvement comes at the cost of considerable storage overhead required on the nodes. In this paper we present SANE, the first routing mechanism that combines the advantages of both \emph{social-aware} and \emph{stateless} approaches. SANE is based on the observation---that we validate on a real-world trace---that individuals with similar interests tend to meet more often. In SANE, individuals (network members) are characterized by their \emph{interest profile}, a compact representation of their interests. By implementing a simple interest profile similarity based routing rule, SANE is free of network state information, thus overcoming the storage capacity problem with existing social-aware approaches. Through thorough experiments, we show the superiority of SANE over existing approaches, both stateful, social-aware and stateless, social-oblivious. Moreover, our interest-based approach easily enables innovative networking services, such as interest-casting. An interest-casting protocol is also introduced in this paper, and evaluated through experiments based on both real-world and synthetic mobility traces.