Several social-aware forwarding strategies have been recently introduced inopportunistic networks, and proved effective in considerably in- creasingrouting performance through extensive simulation studies based on real-worlddata. However, this performance improvement comes at the expense of storing aconsiderable amount of state information (e.g, history of past encounters) atthe nodes. Hence, whether the benefits on routing performance comes directlyfrom the social-aware forwarding mechanism, or indirectly by the fact stateinformation is exploited is not clear. Thus, the question of whethersocial-aware forwarding by itself is effective in improving opportunisticnetwork routing performance remained unaddressed so far. In this paper, we givea first, positive answer to the above question, by investigating the expectedmessage delivery time as the size of the net- work grows larger.
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