Performance Comparison of Multicast Protocols in Mobile Social Networks

摘要

Connecting mobile computing devices, such as smartphones and tablets, anytime and anywhere has been the target of mobile networks in recent decades. Nowadays, this concept is extended to connecting selected people, which requires knowing the social profile of the device users, and therefore created the Mobile Social Network (MSN). Multicast routing in MSNs is concerned with finding and selecting people to deliver a message. Traditional multicast routing protocols do not consider the users' profile. Recently, some social multicast protocols have emerged. These protocols consider the social behavior and relationships of the users to decide which nodes can act as relays and which ones can be considered destinations. The aim of this paper is to experimentally compare and analyze the performance of three known protocols in MSNs. The performance measures used are: delivery ratio, relay count, overhead ratio, hop count and dropped packets. The experiments are run with different network sizes, variable buffer capacities and packets Time-To-Live (TTL). The paper is concluded with a summarized analysis of the compared protocols.