A general data and acknowledgement dissemination scheme in mobile social networks

In this paper, a general data and acknowledgement dissemination mechanism is proposed in mobile social networks (MSNs). Most existing dissemination schemes in MSNs only consider data transmission. However, receiving acknowledgement has many potential applications in MSNs (e.g., mobile trade and incentive mechanism). Challenging problems thus arise due to this type of mixed messages (i.e., data and acknowledgement) dissemination problem. The buffer constraint and time constraint for data and acknowledgement make this problem even harder to handle in a practical scenario. In order to maximize the research objective (e.g., low delay and high delivery ratio), we have to identify the priority of each message in the network. We propose a general priority-based compare-split routing scheme to solve the above buffer exchange problem. During each contact opportunity, first, nodes compare their abilities to send data and acknowledgements based on two types of criteria. They are the contact probability and the social status, which estimate the nodes' direct and indirect relationship with destinations respectively. Nodes then decide which message to exchange, and thus maximize the combined probability. Second, an adaptive priority-based exchange scheme is proposed within each type of message, and so is the relative priority between two types of messages, as to decide the order of exchange. The message with a high priority will be forwarded first, and thus maximize the research objectives. The effectiveness of our scheme is verified through the extensive simulations in synthetic and real traces.