A Field Intensity Based Model for Initiative File Sharing in Mobile Social Networks

Abstract

An intermittently connected mobile social network (ICMSN) is a special kind of delay tolerant network (DTN). Compared with the stable routing path in conventional networks, there is not a stable routing path from source to destination in ICMSNs. In order to deal with the challenging routing issue in ICMSNs, numerous opportunistic routing algorithms have been proposed. However, the existed approaches cannot achieve the optimal performance in file sharing because most of them focus on the general routing but ignore the social characteristic. In addition, the needed resources passively waited until a request has been received by the nodes in the traditional file sharing schemes. In this paper, a field intensity based model is proposed to solve the passive file sharing problem in ICMSNs. This model exploits the field intensity generated from the inherent features of mobile users to decide a better orientation for messages forwarding. Furthermore, a container which be used to store the information of field is designed to reduce overhead. We also propose a field intensity based redundancy control strategy to maintain the number of copies within a reasonable range. Finally, we realize a initiative file sharing system according to the model. The simulation results show that our method has advantages in performance against other methods.