Properties of message forwarding paths in social-aware disconnected mobile networks
One of the main challenges in social-aware disconnected mobile networks is how to effectively forward messages in the highly dynamic evolving topology. Most of the previous work rarely considers real traces of the mobile users, and consequently their proposed forwarding schemes cannot work efficiently in real scenarios. In this paper, we systematically analyze the node contact pattern based on the datasets collected from real experiments to study how the messages are delivered from end to end. We find that both the global encounter occurrence and the contact frequency exhibit unique power-law distributions, which implies apparent spatial dependencies among nodes, and the network connectivity greatly depends on some rarely occurring contacts. Using Time Evolving Graph, we analyze the Minimum Delay Paths (MDPs) for each node pair and find that the average length of a MDP is relatively small, even with a large number of nodes in the networks, which indicates that node cliques are inherently organized into a hierarchy structure as our human society is, and some rare encounters have a significant impact on the average length of the MDP and the message delivery delay.
time evolving graph minimum delay path message delivery opportunistic network mobility trace