LAUSR

In opportunistic social networks, most of the existing store-carry-forward routing mechanisms have severe problems with unfair traffic distribution among nodes and unfair delivery success ratio for individuals. To address these issues, we propose a novel protocol, called fair and social-aware message forwarding (FSMF), for opportunistic social networks. FSMF first introduces a Markov chain model of users’ social ties to evaluate users’ social relationship and then formulates the problems of unfair traffic distribution and unfair delivery success ratio. Moreover, FSMF limits the number of message copies and restricts the number of forwarding copies according to users’ social ties in order to improve fairness. The simulation results show that our protocol has a lower standard deviation of traffic distribution and delivery success ratio.