Social-aware pervasive networks consider the users’ social behaviour to overcome intermittent end-to-end connectivity, inherent to this type of networking: forwarding decisions consider local knowledge about the behaviour of nodes to predict future encounters.

Complex Network Analysis has been used to support contact prediction, by aggregating connectivity graphs into less volatile social graphs. Nevertheless, the structure of such graphs is rather dynamic, since users’ social behaviour and interactions vary throughout their daily routines and according to their mobility. Consequently, aggregation algorithms should be able to create social graphs that reflect the resulting dynamic behaviour of people. Hence, we have been investigating human behaviour aware aggregation algorithms aiming to create graphs based on social variations observed in people’s daily routines. By focusing on the dynamics of the network, we show that social graphs, reflecting different stages of human social behaviour and mobility, are able to take advantage of the potential small-world properties of networks in different time frames, improving the performance of social-aware opportunistic forwarding.

Major References:

- Waldir Moreira, Paulo Mendes, “Dynamics of Social-aware Pervasive Networks” in Proc. of IEEE PERCOM workshop (PerMoby), St. Louis, USA, March 2015

- Waldir Moreira, Paulo Mendes, "Impact of Human Behavior on Social Opportunistic Forwarding", Elsevier Ad Hoc Networks, Special Issue on New Research Challenges in Mobile, Opportunistic and Delay-Tolerant Networks, July 2014

- Waldir Moreira, Paulo Mendes, Susana Sargento, "Social-aware Opportunistic Routing Protocol based on User's Interactions and Interests", in Proc. of AdhocNets, Barcelona, Spain, October 2013

Internet Draft: W. Moreira, P. Mendes and E. Cerqueira, “Opportunistic Routing based on Users Daily Life Routine”, IETF Internet Draft (draft-moreira-dlife-04), May 2014

Learn more in Social-aware Opportunistic Networking.

http://www.paulomilheiromendes.com/research-1/opportunistic-networking