DTN Content Sharing Among Commuters

When discussing vehicular networking we have also to consider the multitude of commuters daily travelling to/from work through public transportation means such as buses, metros, and trains. Indeed, through their smartphones, commuters can generate traffic while moving, thus embodying a significant part of an urban communication scenario. In this context, we discuss a way to port the P2P paradigm into mobile disconnected networks composed by commuters' smartphones. Different from classical P2P file-sharing, users could exchange data in proximity with each other; they can also leverage on peer mobility and encounters in order to extend a requesting peer's reach-area to other local disconnected networks. This is achieved by implementing a DTN-like store-delegate-and-forward communication model over underlying social networks where a peer can delegate unaccomplished data downloads to frequently encountered peers. We show how involving frequently encountered peers/commuters improves the success ratio for the data search request while reducing useless communication overhead.