Friendship and Selfishness Forwarding: applying machine learning techniques to Opportunistic Networks data forwarding

Opportunistic networks could become the solution to provide communication support in both cities where the cellular network could be overloaded, and in scenarios where a fixed infrastructure is not available, like in remote and developing regions. A critical issue that still requires a satisfactory solution is the design of an efficient data delivery solution. Social characteristics are recently being considered as a promising alternative. Most opportunistic network applications rely on the different mobile devices carried by users, and whose behavior affects the use of the device itself. This work presents the “Friendship and Selfishness Forwarding” (FSF) algorithm. FSF analyses two aspects to make message forwarding decisions when a contact opportunity arises: First, it classifies the friendship strength among a pair of nodes by using a machine learning algorithm to quantify the friendship strength among pairs of nodes in the network. Next, FSF assesses the relay node selfishness to consider those cases in which, despite a strong friendship with the destination, the relay node may not accept to receive the message because it is behaving selfishly, or because its device has resource constraints in that moment. By using trace-driven simulations through the ONE simulator, we show that the FSF algorithm outperforms previously proposed schemes in terms of delivery rate, average cost, and efficiency.