for MSN, which were designed by the friendship derived from
the regular meetings of users. In [21], by exploiting the social
characteristics of mobile nodes in MSN, a routing protocol was
proposed, which was referred to as the social contact probabil-
ity assisted routing protocol.
However, the above MSN routing schemes did not consider
the user interest information implied in his interest request,
which can help improve MSN routing efficiency significantly.
Besides, in most MSN routing schemes, contents were not
cached and managed effectively, causing unsatisfactory con-
tent delivery for the forthcoming request. In contrast, our pro-
posed routing scheme integrates ICN paradigm into MSN, find-
ing content provider based on the user interest preference and
managing the cached contents to response to the forthcoming
requests quickly.
About ICN routing, in [22], a flat-name based routing scheme
for ICN was proposed. The structure of a container was ex-
ploited as space where contents or information objects resided,
and bloom filters were utilized as an aggregated form of flat
names and enabled the deepest match routing. In [23], con-
tent management in a cache with finite storage capability was
formulated, and an efficient content management policy which
metamorphosed a node to a self-sustained cache was proposed.
In [24], an intra-domain cache aware routing scheme which
computed paths with the minimum transportation cost was pro-
posed, and it was based on information item demands and
had in-networking caching capabilities. In [25], a geometric
scheme routing was presented based on flat name to conduct
massive content distribution and retrieval, and a tree-based met-
ric space was proposed according to the hierarchical division of
symbol space. In [26], an integrated routing and caching so-
lution were proposed which reduced caching redundancy and
maximized the probability of finding the nearby cached content.
In [27], the Named-data Link State Routing protocol (NLSR)
was presented for Named Data Networking (NDN). Since NDN
used names to identify and retrieve content, the NLSR propa-
gated the reachability to name prefixes instead of IP prefixes.
In [28], a name-based overlay routing scheme named αRoute
was proposed, and both the routing table size and the num-
ber of hops for content lookup were logarithmically bounded
by network size. In [29], the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO)
was introduced into ICN and a novel ACO-inspired ICN rout-
ing mechanism was proposed to retrieve the content. However,
the above ICN routing schemes neglected the social properties
of users which imply their social regularities. In fact, our pro-
posed routing scheme exploits these properties and improves
routing efficiency.
As far as we know, there exist a few researches about inte-
grating ICN paradigm into MSN routing. In [30], by leveraging
the NDN principle, a social-aware NDN framework was pro-
posed to achieve efficient cooperative content retrieval. In [31],
a content retrieval architecture based on social metric was pro-
posed in disruption tolerant mobile ICN. In [32], the routing
scheme delivered the content by using the selective agent and
relay nodes. In particular, we respectively compare our work to
the above three researches on interest routing, data routing and
in-network caching.
Figure 1: The structure of interest packet and data packet
Figure 2: ICRS system framework
When routing interest packet, [30] was based on the en-
counter times to the requested content of the node. However,
since contents were held by nodes sparsely, the majority of
nodes did not have encountered the requested content, thus
impacting routing efficiency. In our work, even if the major-
ity of nodes have never encountered the requested content be-
fore, the node that has similar interest preference with the con-
tent provider can encounter the provider with high probabil-
ity at their common PoI. In addition, in [31], interest packet
was firstly forwarded to the node with the highest social sta-
tus, since such node was allowed to know which node is the
content provider. Then, interest packet was forwarded to the
content provider based on the encounter time duration with the
provider. However, before routing interest packet to the con-
tent provider, routing scheme should find the node with the
highest social status. Such method brought the high number
of packet delivery hops and long packet delivery delay since
it separated the process of content provider finding and that of
interest packet forwarding. In contrast, our work selects the
forwarding node for interest packet based on the user interest
preference to find the content provider. Moreover, in [32], in-
terest packet was forwarded to the node with many friends and
much caching space. However, it could not find out the con-
tent provider effectively, since it was unaware of the requested
content. In contrast, our work has awareness of the requested
content based on the user interest preference.
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