Show me your friends and I’ll tell you what you like

Pocket Switched Networks (PSN), where humans carry short range communicating devices such as PDAs, lap-tops, or smart phones, have attracted the attention of many researchers in recent years. These networks, whose main feature is the social-guided movements of users/devices, are considered to be a key technology to provide innovative services to the users without the need of any fixed infrastructure. Even though many forwarding protocols (statefull socialaware–e.g. PROPHET, BUBBLE–and stateless ones–e.g. Epidemic, BinarySW) have been proposed, there’s still a need for efficient killer application, possibly both stateless and social-aware, that would transform the PSNs in a useful living reality. Here we discuss on the advantages/disadvantages/scalability of already existing stateful social-aware and simple stateless forwarding protocols for PSNs and introduce a stateless interest-based forwarding mechanism that combines the advantages of both forwarding approaches.