Effective Social Relationship-based Routing Strategy in Vessel Ad Hoc Networks

In recent years, the application of vessel networks has become more and more widespread, and the research for the social properties in Vessel Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) has attracted attention. Existing studies targeting relationships among vessels neither consider enough factors nor take reality into account. This paper fully exploits the vessel-vessel (V-V) and vessel-port (V-P) relationships and propose metrics Closeness (or simply C) and Social Distance (SD) to depict their strength. We also design a Closeness-based Routing strategy (CR) to achieve efficient message transmissions. By applying a real data set of vessel trajectories, a simulation experiment is conducted to evaluate the performance of routing we design. The results show that CR reaches higher message delivery ratio and lower cost compared with other existing routing methods.