User popularity-based packet scheduling for congestion control in ad-hoc social networks

• User popularity-based packet scheduling is explored for ad-hoc social networks.
• The scheme can avoid the dropping of the most popular node's data.
• It helps effectively control congestion and fully utilize available bandwidth.
• It can maintain fairness among flows and nodes.
• Simulations have been conducted for performance evaluation and comparison.

Traditional ad-hoc network packet scheduling schemes cannot fulfill the requirements of proximity-based ad-hoc social networks (ASNETs) and they do not behave properly in congested environments. To address this issue, we propose a user popularity-based packet scheduling scheme for congestion control in ASNETs called Pop-aware. The proposed algorithm exploits social popularity of sender nodes to prioritize all incoming flows. Pop-aware also provides fairness of service received by each flow. We evaluate the performance of Pop-aware through a series of simulations. In comparison with some existing scheduling algorithms, Pop-aware performs better in terms of control overhead, total overhead, average throughput, packet loss rate, packet delivery rate and average delay.