MPAR: A movement pattern-aware optimal routing for social delay tolerant networks

Social Delay Tolerant Networks (SDTNs) are a special kind of Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) that consists of a number of mobile devices with social characteristics. The current research achievements on routing algorithms tend to separately evaluate the available profit for each prospective relay node and cannot achieve the global optimal performance in an overall perspective. In this paper, we propose a Movement Pattern-Aware optimal Routing (MPAR) for SDTNs, by choosing the optimal relay node(s) set for each message, which eventually based on running a search algorithm on a hyper-cube solution space. Concretely, the movement pattern of a group of node(s) can be extracted from the movement records of nodes. Then the set of commonly visited locations for the relay node(s) set and the destination node is obtained, by which we can further evaluate the co-delivery probability of the relay node(s) set. Both local search scheme and tabu-search scheme are utilized in finding the optimal set, and the tabu-search based routing Tabu-MPAR is proved able to guide the relay node(s) set in evolving to the optimal one. We demonstrate how the MPAR algorithm significantly outperforms the previous ones through extensive simulations, based on the synthetic SDTN mobility model.