TemsRoute: A temporally and socially aware routing framework for delay-tolerant networks

Tianming Zhang, Renbo Zhang, Zhengyi Yang, Lu Chen, Yunjun Gao, Xiaochun Yang

Abstract: In the realm of delay-tolerant networks (DTNs), designing a routing strategy that optimizes relay vertex selection for faster message dissemination and lower network overhead is an important and challenging topic. DTNs inherently exhibit temporal variations, characterized by mobility and intermittent connectivity. In addressing this, in the paper, we model DTNs as temporal networks and propose a temporally and socially aware routing framework, called TemsRoute, which takes both the temporal betweenness centrality and the social information into consideration to intelligently identify optimal relay vertices. Within the TemsRoute, we devise exact and approximate heuristic sorting-based label propagation methods, together with two pruning lemmas, to efficiently compute the temporal betweenness centrality. We also introduce four metrics to calculate social relevance between pairs of vertices. Additionally, we explore how to incrementally update the approximate temporal betweenness centrality within the context of temporal graph streams. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world DTNs underscore the superior performance of TemsRoute. It achieves the highest message delivery rate and the lowest message average delay when compared to six other routing methods. This underscores the potential of TemsRoute to improve message dissemination efficiency in certain dynamic and challenging DTN scenarios, particularly those involving sporadic connectivity, frequent topology changes, and limited resources.