Popularity of Nodes in Pocket Switched Networks

Pocket Switched Networking (PSN) is a new communication paradigm for mobile devices [1]. It takes advantage of every communication opportunity, and the physical mobility of the devices, in order to transport data to destinations. Efficient forwarding in this context today remains challenging. When mobile devices are carried by a group of people in the same area, one should expect each device to connect multiple subgroups together, and a fraction of devices to connect many of them. In other words, the “popularity” of a device as a relay between sources and destinations may vary a lot. In this work, we use real measurements of human mobility to study node’s popularity, as a first step towards understanding the impact of popularity on forwarding algorithms.