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.