Data dissemination in mobile social networks with the acknowledgment feedback

Most existing dissemination schemes in Mobile Social Networks (MSNs) only consider the data dissemination. However, there are two types of messages: data and the control message (i.e., acknowledgment) in MSNs, and receiving acknowledgment is very important in many applications (e.g., the mobile trade and the incentive mechanism). In order to maximize the desired message delivery ratio, we have to identify the priority of each message in the network during the limited contact opportunity. Therefore, we propose a generic priority-based compare-split routing scheme, which proves to be the optimal buffer exchange strategy. During each contact opportunity, relays compare their forwarding abilities to different destinations based on two types of criteria: the contact probability and the social status. Ideally, each relay keeps the messages whose destinations meet the current relay frequently. Then, an adaptive priority-based exchange scheme, which considers the priority within each type of messages and the relative priority between two types of messages, is proposed to exchange the most benefit messages. The effectiveness of our scheme is verified through extensive simulations in synthetic and real traces.