Impact of Social Mobility on Routing Protocols for Opportunistic Networks

Opportunistic networks are wireless mobile networks in which a continuous end-to-end path between a source and a destination is not necessary. Messages are stored at intermediate nodes, and opportunistically forwarded when a more suitable next hop towards the destination becomes available. A very interesting aspect is understanding how users' mobility patterns impact on the performance of routing protocols. Starting from this motivation, in this paper we take into consideration group mobility models, whose movement patterns have shown to be remarkably similar to real-world user movements. We consider routing protocols representative of a broad range of schemes, and highlight the impact of users social relationships and movement patterns on the protocols' performance.