Opportunistic Message Broadcasting in Campus Environments

In this paper, we propose an infrastructure- independent opportunistic mobile social networking strategy for efficient message broadcasting in campus environments. Specifically, we focus on the application scenario of university campuses. In our model, the students' smart-phones forward messages to each other. The messages are created spontaneously as independent events in various places of the campus. The events can be either urgent security alerts or private announcements to the students currently on the campus. Our proposed state- based campus routing (SCR) protocol is based on the idle and active states of the students in indoor and outdoor places. The proposed model is analyzed through extensive network simulations using mobility datasets collected from students on University of Milano and University of Cambridge campuses. The opportunistic network model and the SCR protocol are compared with epidemic, epidemic with TTS (Times To Send), PROPHET, and random routing protocols. The message delivery performance of SCR is close to Epidemic and PROPHET while SCR reduces the amount of message transmissions.