Abstract:

Mobile opportunistic networks which are formed by humancarried intelligent devices, implement the packet transmission between nodes by taking advantages of the relay forwarding based on the “storecarryforward” principle of communication. In order to improve the network performance, the social attributes of nodes are often used to select the relay and make data forwarding decisions. However, the existing packet transmission mechanisms usually use partial social attributes of nodes therefore the social relationship between the nodes cannot be fully reflected. We propose a new packet transmission mechanism based on hybrid social groups in mobile opportunistic networks. We define the concept of hybrid social group, provide the construction method of hybrid social groups and design a packet transmission algorithm. Experiments on several real data sets demonstrate that the proposed mechanism has a higher transmission success rate, a shorter transmission delay and a better performance in comparison with the existing socialgroup routing schemes.

Key words: hybrid social group, mobile opportunistic networks, packet transmission mechanism, historical encounters, social features