A Social Cognitive Heuristic for Adaptive Data Dissemination in Mobile Opportunistic Networks

It is commonly agreed that data will be one of the cornerstones of Future Internet systems. In this context, mobile Opportunistic Networks (ONs) are one of the key paradigms to support, in a self-organising and decentralised manner, the growth of data generated by localized interactions between users mobile devices, and between them and nearby devices such as IoT nodes. In ONs, the spontaneous collaboration among mobile devices is exploited to disseminate data toward interested users. However, the limited resources and knowledge available at each node, and the vast amount of data available, make it difficult to devise efficient schemes to accomplish this task. Recent solutions propose to equip each device with data filtering methods derived from human data processing schemes, known as Cognitive Heuristics, i.e. very effective methods used by the brain to quickly drop useless information, while keeping the most relevant one. These solutions can become less effective when facing dynamic scenarios or situations where nodes cannot fully collaborate. One of the reasons is that the solutions proposed so far do not take take into account the social structure of the environment where the nodes move in. To be more effective, the selection of information performed by each node should take into consideration this dimension of the environment. In this paper we propose a social-based data dissemination scheme, based on the cognitive Social Circle Heuristic. This evaluation method exploits the structure of the social environment to make inferences about the relevance of discovered information. We show how the Social Circle Heuristic, coupled with a cognitive-based community detection scheme, can be exploited to design an effective data dissemination algorithm for ONs. We provide a detailed analysis of the performance of the proposed solution via simulation.