Enhancement of routing protocols for adhoc networks using social networks

Abstract

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a set of autonomous mobile devices connected by wireless links in a distributed manner and without a fixed infrastructure. Real time multimedia services such as video-streaming over MANETs represent a very promising application for instance in a natural disaster scenario where it is very likely the infrastructure get destroyed as well as for entertainment purposes. On the other hand, social web technologies, where people actively interact online with others through social networks, are leading to a socialization of networks. Information of interaction among users is being used to provide socially-enhanced software. To achieve this, we need to know the strength of the relationship between a given user and each user he interacts with. This strength of the relationship can be measured through a concept called Tie Strength (TS), first introduced by Mark Granovetter in 1973. This study evaluates the performance of the Multipath Multimedia Dynamic Source Routing (MMDSR) protocol when including this new proposed social metric, TS, and tries to find a trade-off where we get a benefit in the sense of increasing the trust between users forming the forwarding path till a point in which QoS is not affected significantly.