A Utility-Oriented Routing Scheme for Interest-Driven Community-Based Opportunistic Networks

Opportunistic networks, as representative networks evolved from social networks and Ad-hoc networks, have been on cutting edges in recent years. Many research efforts have focused on realistic mobility models and cost-effective routing schemes. The concept of “community”, as one of the most inherent attributes of opportunistic networks, has been proved to be very helpful in simulating mobility traces of human society and selecting suitable message forwarders. This paper proposes an interest-driven community-based mobility model by considering location preference and time variance in human behavior patterns. Based on this enhanced mobility model, a novel two-layer routing algorithm, named InterCom, is presented by jointly considering utilities generated by users’ activity degree and social relationships. The results, obtained throughout an intensive simulation analysis, show that the proposed routing scheme is able to improve delivery ratio while keeping the routing overhead and transmission delay within a reasonable range with respect to well-known routing schemes for opportunistic networks.