2012 IEEE 12th International Conference on Computer and Information Technology

A Surve\ on Social-based Routing and Forwarding Protocols in Opportunistic Networks

Li Liu/ Shandong JiaoTong University The School of Information Science and Electrical Engineering JiNan, China Liuli.free@gmail.com
Abstract The exploitation of social context for routing in opportunistic networks is a relatively recent trend. In this paper, we survey the routing and forwarding protocols in opportunistic networks from social aspect. We classify the routing protocols into three categories: routing based on community, routing based on regular mobility pattern and routing based on combination of context and social information. We analyze and compare the typical routing protocols, furthermore point out the problems of duplication and congestion in the future work. Keywords-Opportunistic Networks; Forwarding Protocol; Social Networks Routing and

Yanfang Jing/ LiaoCheng University

The School of Computer Science LiaoCheng China yanfang_jing@126.com

I.

INTRODUCTION

The proliferation of powerful mobile devices such as netbooks, smart phones, laptops, and sensors makes novel mobile communication paradigms a more concerning area of research recent years which is called opportunistic networks [1]. Generally, in opportunistic networks, there is not always an end-to-end path between source and destination nodes at any time. Nevertheless, opportunistic networks allow such node to exchange message between nodes in multi-hop ways. It uses the mobility contact opportunity between the nodes to forward the message to encountered nodes until it reaches its destination which is referred as store-carry-and-forward mechanism. And the mobility is seen as a resource to bridge disconnections, rather than a problem to deal with. The routing and forwarding issue is compelling task in the opportunistic networks, due to the lack of global knowledge and sporadic contacts between nodes. How to select a forwarding node to offer the best trade-off between the delivery efficiency and cost is the key problem in routing and forwarding protocol design in opportunistic networks [2]. In the mobile opportunistic networks, the mobile device is carried by people, and the peoples mobility is parallel to the mobile devices mobility. As people encounter each other, their wireless devices such as mobile phones can communicate wirelessly, using every available opportunity, to forward information from person to person [3][4]. The plain fact that the many of the ad hoc networks are basically humancentered and follow the way humans come into contact, helps researchers to realize the significance of borrowing concepts from the field of social network analysis (SNA) to the design of more efficient protocols [5].

Many social-based routing and forwarding protocol in opportunistic networks are proposed. According to the variant social concept and theories used for the forwarding algorithm, the social-based routing and forwarding protocols are classified into three categories: routing based on community, routing based on regular mobility pattern and routing based on combination of context and social information. The purpose of this article is to provide a survey of the routing and forwarding protocol in opportunistic networks from social aspect. The rest of this paper is organized as follows: three categories are described respectively in section, , . Section gives some routing problems in future research work. Finally conclusion is given in Section . II. ROUTING BASED ON COMMUNITY

Community and centrality are two specific social properties which are popular used in the design of routing and forwarding protocol. The fact that people inherently form groups creates the concept of community, which is defined as partitions of network nodes into densely connected subgroups [6]. It is believed that nodes in same community have more opportunities to contact and are likely to meet regularly. Hui and Crowcroft created a human mobility experiment during IEEE InfoCom 2006 which, for the first time, demonstrates that identifying community can improve message delivery [7]. They propose a routing protocol called LABEL. LABEL assumes that each node has a label on behalf of its affiliation. That is, nodes in same affiliation have the same label. When forwarding message, it directly forward messages to destination, or chose next-hop nodes with the same label as a forwarding node. With in the community, some people are more popular, and interact with more people than others [8]. The importance of popular people is synonymous with the strategic location of the network. This prominence is described by numerous centrality measures which can be used to quantify the relaying utility of network nodes and inform routing decisions. The most noteworthy centrality metrics are based on degree, betweenness, and closeness, etc. The centrality metrics is usually related with interact frequency. BUBBLE RAP [8] combines the knowledge of community structure with the nodes betweenness centrality to make forwarding decisions. The authors
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978-0-7695-4858-6/12 $26.00 2012 IEEE DOI 10.1109/CIT.2012.135

propose three algorithms, named SIMPLE, K-CLIQUE and MODULARITY to detect community and define global ranking and local ranking which identify global centrality and local centrality in local community respectively. When a node has a message destine for another node. The node first bubbles the message up through hierarchical ranking tree using the global ranking until reach a node which is in the same community as the destination one. Then in the same community, the message is bubbled up through local ranking tree using the local ranking until the destination is reached or message expires. LocalCom [9] presents similarity metrics which is deduced from the closeness (which is based on average separation period) and irregularity metrics to depict the relationship between each pair of nodes in DTN. It implies the community detection only utilizing local information considering indirect neighboring relationship. LocalCom also considers the inter-community interaction besides intra-community. And it proposes two marking and pruning schemes: static pre-pruning and dynamic pruning to select the forwarding nodes called bridge in inter-community. It applies different forwarding approaches between intra-community and intercommunity. Single hop source routing is for intracommunity packet forwarding whereas controlled flooding routing is for inter-community communication based on the bridge nodes. Ref. [10] propose a Community-based Data Transmission Scheme (CDTS) which organizes all nodes into different community based on the contact frequency. Within a community, the number of data copies and forwarding opportunity are determined according to the contact frequency of nodes. Inter-community data forwarding can be implemented by active nodes. In [11], a friendship based routing is proposed. It introduces a new metric called social pressure metric (SPM) to reflect the nodes friendship relations considering high frequency, longevity and regularity. Using the directed and indirect friendship, it defines its different friendship community in different periods. By use of SPM, each node defines its friendship community with direct and indirect friendship and defines temporally differentiated friendship community. III.
ROUTING BASED ON REGULAR MOBILITY PATTERN

transition and sojourn time probability distributions are determined from modes mobility history. Considering encounter time, Nazir et al. [16] assume that people follow similar mobility patterns daily (i.e. Monday to Friday) and propose algorithms for social encounter based content delivery system for time critical applications. Ref. [17] observe that while habitual mobility is useful in reducing the average communication latency, irregular deviation from habit can seriously affect worst-case performance. They propose Diverse Routing (DR) to cope with the nodes deviating from their habitual activities. The main idea of DR is to statistically clusters the network into proximity-based social cluster and scatter at least one copy of a packet in a cluster such that even deviant nodes will be close to at least one of these packet. IV.
ROUTING BASED ON THE COMBINATION OF CONTEXT AND SOCIAL INFORMATION

In [12][13], authors point out from reality that nodes in a network within a social environment have repeated mobility patterns in spatial and temporal aspects. From spatial aspect, nodes usually move around a set of wellvisited places, while in some social environment node trajectory in time is almost deterministic from temporal aspect. For example, everyday life of people always repeated in working days. The mobile devices can predict these regular mobility patterns over time using the history data and select the best information carriers. In PROPHET [14], vectors are exchanged indicating the probability of each node to deliver their messages. Predict and Relay [15] employs a time-homogeneous semi-markov process model that describes node mobility as transitions between possible locations. Location

The context information such as nodes interests, friends, locations and history records, and so on, are also the important information to decide the best relay nodes. In general, nodes with common interests may interact frequently. Sociologists have long known that social networks display a high degree of transitivity, show that there is a heightened probability of two people being acquainted if they have one or more other acquaintances in common [18]. PeopleRank [19] which is inspired by the famous web page ranking gives higher weight to nodes if they are socially connected to other important nodes of the network. Authors define social relationship using declared friends and common interests in centralized way, while update PeopleRank during contact process in distributed way. The intuition is that socially well connected nodes are better suited to forward message towards any given destination. Thus, the higher PeopleRank node is selected as a forwarder. History records demonstrate the regular mobility patterns of the nodes. If the nodes current location is the same with the history records, then the node has higher probability to follow the habitual mobility. Otherwise, if the nodes current location is different with the history records, then the node has higher probability to deviate the habitual mobility. Recently, many routing protocols are based on the combination of context and social information and forward message according to variant aspects. HiBop (History-Based routing protocol of opportunistic networks) is a context-aware framework which can learn and represent through context information, the users behavior and their social relations [20]. HiBop remembers the present context and the historical context of each node to exploit the social behaviors and relations among nodes. Then it evaluates the meeting probabilities based on the similarity with context information of destination, and selects the best forwarders. In order to control the message replication, HiBop only allow the sender create multiple copies of the messages. Other nodes do not keep copies of forwarded messages. It also analyzes the sensitiveness, scalability and privacy issues about HiBop. HiBop supports both unicast and group communications

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(multi-cast, any-cast) without requiring any particular customization. Daly and Haahr propose SimBet protocol which selects the best forwarder according to the utility function combining the betweenness centrality and similarity in [18]. Considering the nodes past interactions to support the efficient message delivery in disconnected delaytolerant MANETs, they proposes SimBetTS [21] protocol which combines a nodes betweenness centrality, a nodes social similarity to the destination node and a nodes tie strength relationship with the destination node into together as a social metrics. Gently [22] is based on the Context-aware Adaptive Routing (CAR) protocol and LABEL. It defines names (label) to identify group (community) of hosts. A recipient I of a message can be a single host or a group (community) of hosts. Gently uses LABEL based routing when destination is not in reach, but a host in the same community which destination belongs to is in reach while Gently use CAR-like routing when no node in destination community in reach and inside the community.

V.

OPEN PROBLEM AND FUTURE WORK

In current message forwarding protocols, multi-copies of messages are forwarded in order to achieve high throughput. But the redundant message duplication cause the high overhead of the network. In the worst-case 94% of duplicate packets reach the destination so as to induce an overhead on bandwidth, energy and memory consumption [23]. Many protocols aim at achieving an efficient tradeoff by controlling duplication. The social-based routing protocol leads the routing to direct most of the traffic through a small subset of good nodes (e.g. centrality node). For instance, in the SimBet algorithm, the top 10% of nodes carry out 54% of all the forwards and 85% of all the handover [24]. This unfair load distribution causes local storage congestion, furthermore increases the discarding rate and decrease the delivery rate. There are typically several solutions to the congestion problem such as: slowing sending rates of the sources, using alternative routes, discarding traffic, or migrating messages to alternative storage locations [26].

TABLE
COMPARISION OF TYPICAL PROTOCOLS

Publication [7], 200

Social Concept Used Inter-contact time, contact time, community community, node centrality

Proposed Algorithm LABEL which using label telling its affiliation/group, forward messages to destination or to next-hop nodes belonging to the same group(same label) as the destination. BUBBELE RAP first bubble up the message using global ranking to the same community as the destination, then bubble up the message to the destination using local ranking. LocalCom is a community-based epidemic algorithm which detects the community using similarity metrics according to nodes encounter history, selects and prunes gateways to connect communities. SimBet routing exploits the exchanges of preestimated betweenness centralit y metrics and locally determined social similarity to the destination node. SimBetTs are based on social analysis of a nodes past interactions which consists of a nodes betweenness centrality, a nodes social similarity to the destination node and a nodes tie strength relationship with the destination node. HiBop learns and represents through context information, the users behavior and their social relations, and uses this knowledge to drive the forwarding process. Gently is Combination of CAR and LABEL protocol.

Compared Algorithm MCP, CONTROL, WAIT

Remark Large improvement in forwarding performance, delivery ratio and cost.

[8], 2008

MCP, LABEL, FLOOD, WAIT, PROPHET PROPHET, BUBBLE RAP, Flooding

Similar delivery ratio to, but much lower resource utilization than flooding, control flooding, and PROPHET. Outperform the BUBBLE RAP and PEOPHET in terms of delivery ratio, especially with a moderate delay requirement.

[9], 2009

similarity, community

[18], 2007

Betweenness centrality, social similarity Betweenness centrality, social similarity, tie strength

Epidemic, PROPHET

Delivery performance close to Epidemic routing but with significantly reduced overhead, outperform PROPHET. Delivery performance close to Epidemic routing but with significantly reduced overhead, outperform PROPHET.

[21], 2009

Epidemic, PROPHET

[20], 2008

social behavior, social relations, similarity community

Epidemic, PROPHET

Drastically reduce the resource consumption in terms of network traffic and buffer occupation.

[22], 2008,

Implementation in Haggle framework.

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To fair the load distribution, Fair Routing [25] exploits the social process of perceived interaction strength based on the interaction strength between nodes in a short term and long time scale. It forwards the message by the stronger social relation and uses assortative-based queue control to limit the exchange of message to those users with similar social status. In other words, nodes will only accept forwarding request from those nodes of equal or higher status. Nile [27] keeps the link loads in check to push replicas only to those paths that are both promising and may sustain more load. Radenkovic and Grundy [28] introduce congestion driven part in forwarding protocol to avoids nodes that have lower availability and higher congestion rates. In the future work, the reduction of duplication and congestion in routing and forwarding protocols are also very challenging problems. Taken the social information into consideration, the problems of duplication and congestion will be optimized through more accurate delay selection and buffer management. The summary of typical routing protocols is described in Table. VI.
CONCLUSION

In Opportunistic Networks, there are not always end-toend paths from source to destination contemporary. The messages are forwarded in pair-wise contact to the encounters through carry-store-forward mechanism. The selection of the delay nodes is a big problem in routing protocol. In this paper, we survey the routing and forwarding protocols in opportunistic networks from social aspect. According to the selection strategy, we classify the routing protocols into three categories: routing based on community, routing based on regular mobility pattern and routing based on combination of context and social information. We analyze and compare the typical routing protocols. And we study the problems of duplication and congestion in the protocol. REFERENCES
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