Trustful Data Forwarding in Social Opportunistic Networks

More and more people are using smartphones to gain access to the Internet. Cell phone providers are forced to expand their existing networks or slow down the Internet connection of their customers to counteract with problems concerning network congestion, which emerge from the increasing data traffic. In this paper we present an approach to cope with the described problem by forming a social opportunistic network based on smartphone devices. We developed a protocol to provide trustful data forwarding making use of movement patterns and physical social networks of humans carrying their mobile devices. We evaluated the performance of our protocol by using The ONE simulator and compared the results with Epidemic Routing, Prophet and Spray and Wait. The simulations show that our approach causes low network congestion. In comparison to other protocols, our approach handles network resources efficiently while also providing data forwarding in a trustful manner.