Opportunistic Routing in Drone-Augmented Mobile Social Networks

Mobile social network (MSN) technologies are producing viable solutions to many critical scenarios, including disaster recovery, mobile crowdsourcing, mobile file caching, mobile agent systems, and so on. MSN performance as well as practices can be further improved by drones, which are small battery-powered autonomous aerial vehicles. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no routing protocol designed for drone-augmented MSNs. Therefore, in this paper, we first introduce a new routing paradigm, called drone-augmented opportunistic routing for landmark-based MSNs. By incorporating the random mobility of mobile nodes as well as the deterministic mobility of drones, the opportunistic path model is defined. The key idea of our path model is the reduction to anycast-like routing to multiple destinations with different deadlines, in which the high mobility of drones is exploited. Then, we propose the drone-augmented opportunistic routing (DAOR) protocol, which forwards messages along the path with the smallest weight based on the greedy strategy. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed DAOR achieves its design goals.