Modeling homogeneous contact distribution of nodes and its application in routing in Mobile Social Networks

Different types of contact, including contact between node pairs, any-contact of nodes, and contacts of the entire network, are used to characterize social relations in mobile social networks. Different modes of routing, from the point of view of message delivery semantics, encompass unicasting, multicasting, any-casting, and broadcasting. Studies have shown that using probability distribution functions of contact data, which is mainly assumed to be homogeneous for nodes, improves the performance of these networks. However, there exists an important challenge in studies on distributions. A lot of works apply the distribution of one type of contact to other types. Hence in routing applications, it causes to use of the distribution of one type of contact for any mode of routing. This study provides a complete solution to model each type of homogeneous contact data distribution and to use them in different modes of routing. We propose a routing algorithm that uses this new model. Results show that our solution improves the average latency of comparing methods Epidemic, TCCB, and DR about 3.5-times, 30%, and 45%, respectively. It achieves a delivery rate of about 5% and 6%, and average latency about 6% and 8% better than that of DR and TCCB, respectively.