Expertise-based data access in content-centric mobile opportunistic networks

Abstract

In mobile opportunistic networks, most existing research focuses on how to choose appropriate relays to carry and forward data. Although relay selection is an important issue, other issues such as finding content from people with the right expertise are also very important since the ultimate goal of using mobile opportunistic network is to provide the right content to mobile users (nodes). In this paper, we study expertise-based data access in content-centric mobile opportunistic networks, where the objective is to minimize the average query delay given a sequence of queries considering node expertise, node queuing delay and communication delay. To solve this problem, we propose various query forwarding approaches under deterministic and probabilistic expertise models. Specifically, we propose centralized approaches to assign queries based on a modified Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm and distributed approaches in which query forwarding is based on a utility metric. Extensive simulations on both synthetic and realistic traces demonstrate that our solutions outperform existing approaches.