Weak social ties improve content delivery in behavior-aware opportunistic networks

In the era of pervasive mobile computing, human encounters can be leveraged to enable new forms of social interactions mediated by the personal devices of individuals. In this framework, emerging needs, such as content dissemination, social discovery and question and answering, advocate the raising of novel communication paradigms where the binding content-recipients is not provided by the sender (in the classical IP addressing style), but directly executed by specific recipients with interest in it. This paper proposes a novel communication protocol, named InterestCast, or ICast, solving the problem for a wide range of social scenarios and applying to an opportunistic network whose nodes are the personal devices of moving individuals, possibly interacting with fixed road-side devices. The protocol is able to chase users’ interests decoupling content tags from locations and social communities. In order to cross community boundaries and reach farthest destinations, ICast adopts mechanisms that properly extract weak ties, i.e. encounters between nodes that rarely interact, but that connect different communities. The main advantages the proposal achieves are: it ensures remarkable performance results; it is simple and feasible and it keeps computational and networking costs low; it can preserve users’ privacy.