Social-Aware Forwarding Improves Routing Performance in Pocket Switched Networks

Several social-aware forwarding strategies have been recently intro-duced in opportunistic networks, and proved effective in considerably in-creasing routing performance through extensive simulation studies based on real-world data. However, this performance improvement comes at the expense of storing a considerable amount of state information (e.g, history of past encounters) at the nodes. Hence, whether the benefits on routing performance comes directly from the social-aware forwarding mechanism, or indirectly by the fact state information is exploited is not clear. Thus, the question of whether social-aware forwarding by itself is effective in im-proving opportunistic network routing performance remained unaddressed so far. In this paper, we give a first, positive answer to the above question, by investigating the expected message delivery time as the size of the net-work grows larger. In order to make a fair comparison with stateless