Location-based Routing for Opportunistic Networks

We tackle the problem of locality-aware message spreading in a network composed of smart mobile devices, without resorting to any backbone communication infrastructure. The motivations for our work are two-fold. First, recent smart mobile devices are capable of capturing and storing location information (at a significant granularity) by using, e.g., GPS service and storage capacity available in the devices. Second, recent studies have shown that mobility is positively correlated with the building of new social relationships, which are relatively more likely to occur for people who have visited common places in the past. These two factors together show the importance of building proximity based communication networks, and the need of messages spreading among a targeted set of users in a network. We assume that the participating users move in a large geographic area, and a location inside the area can be uniquely identified by any user, for example, using GPS coordinates. Each user independently builds her mobility profile, called MobyZone, considering her own past mobility traces. The MobyZone of a user is the set of her most visited places.