A social cognitive heuristic for adaptive data dissemination in mobile Opportunistic Networks

It is commonly agreed that data (and data-centric services) will be one of the cornerstones of Future Internet systems. In this context, mobile Opportunistic Networks (OppNets) are one of the key paradigms to efficiently support, in a self-organising and decentralised manner, the growth of data generated by localised interactions between users mobile devices, and between them and nearby smart devices such as IoT nodes. In OppNets scenarios, the spontaneous collaboration among mobile devices is exploited to disseminate data towards interested users. However, the limited resources and knowledge available at each node, and the vast amount of data available in the network, make it difficult to devise efficient schemes to accomplish this task. Recent solutions propose to equip each device with data filtering methods derived from human information processing schemes, known as Cognitive Heuristics. They are very effective methods used by human brains to quickly drop useless information and keep only the most relevant information. Although cognitive-based OppNet solutions proved to be efficient (with limited overheads), they can become less effective when facing dynamic scenarios or situations where nodes cannot fully collaborate with each other, as we show in this paper. One of the reasons is that the solutions proposed so far do not take into account the social structure of the environment where the nodes are moving in. In order to be more effective, the selection of information performed by each node should take into consideration not only the relevance of content for the local device, but also for other devices will encounter in the future due to mobility. To this end, in this paper we propose a social-based data dissemination scheme, based on a cognitive heuristic, known as the Social Circle Heuristic. This heuristic is an evaluation method that exploits the structure of the social environment to make inferences about the relevance of discovered information. We show how the Social Circle Heuristic, coupled with a cognitive-based community detection scheme, can be exploited to design an effective data dissemination algorithm for OppNets. We provide a detailed analysis of the performance of the proposed solution via simulation.