Social-Aware Stateless Forwarding in Pocket Switched Networks

In this paper we describe SANE, the first forwarding mechanism that combines the advantages of both social-aware and stateless approaches in pocket switched network routing. SANE is based on the observation-that we validate on real-world traces-that individuals with similar interests tend to meet more often. In our approach, individuals (network members) are characterized by their interest profile, a compact representation of their interests. Through extensive experiments, we show the superiority of social-aware, stateless forwarding over existing stateful, social-aware and stateless, social-oblivious forwarding. An important byproduct of our interest-based approach is that it easily enables innovative routing primitives, such as interest-casting. An interest-casting protocol is also described, and extensively evaluated through experiments based on both real-world and synthetic mobility traces.