Social based throwbox placement in large-scale throwbox-assisted Delay Tolerant Networks

Recent advances in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) allow delivering packets among mobile devices via opportunistic communications during intermittent contacts. However, the lack of rich contact opportunities still causes poor delivery ratio and long delay of DTN routing, especially for large-scale networks. Deployment of additional stationary throwboxes can create a greater number of contact opportunities, thus improve the performance of DTN routing. However, the locations of deployed throwboxes are critical to such improvement. In this paper, we investigate where to deploy throwboxes in a large-scale throwbox-assisted DTN. By leveraging the social properties discovered from real-life tracing data, we propose a set of social-based throwbox placement algorithms which smartly pick the location of each throwbox. Extensive simulations are conducted with a real-life wireless tracing dataset and a wide range of existing DTN routing methods. The results confirm the efficiency of the proposed methods.