Research Article
Implementation and Analysis of Clustering Techniques
Applied on Pocket Switched Network
Muhammad Ali,
1
Mah-Rukh Fida,
2
Ameer Shakayb Arsalaan,
3
and Awais Adnan
1
1
Department of Computer Science, Institute of Management Sciences, Peshawar 25100, Pakistan
2
Shaheed Benazir Bhutto Women University, Peshawar 25000, Pakistan
3
COMSATS Institute of Information Technology Attock, Attock 43600, Pakistan
Correspondence should be addressed to Muhammad Ali; muhammad.ali@imsciences.edu.pk
Received 10 April 2015; Revised 13 August 2015; Accepted 1 September 2015
Academic Editor: Federico Barrero
Copyright © 2015 Muhammad Ali et al. Tis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License,
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Clustering is an extraction of closely knitted groups from a set of nodes. Its benefts in social network range from applying
marketing schemes on an appropriate interest group to social network analysis. It is also considered an important tool for efcient
communication in an intermittent Pocket Switched Network (PSN). Contact probability between mobile devices in disrupted social
networks greatly depends upon the mobility profle and level of relationships between the device holders. Unlike fat routing,
scalable and efcient routing in these networks is highly dependent upon accurate derivation of social circles or clusters. Tis paper
therefore evaluates existing clustering techniques for terrestrial social network with the end aim of minimizing communication
overhead by identifying those message carriers that can bring message closer to destination node. In order to ensure intercluster
routing, modifcation in existing schemes is proposed so as to detect bridge nodes between single hop destination clusters and to
fnd path towards a disjoint destination cluster.
1. Introduction
Social network is made of people tied with each other due to
common interest and sameness of geographic location and
of work place. Te advent of social media such as Twitter
and LinkedIn has given an opportunity to like-minded and
known people to build up virtual communities by creating,
sharing, and exchanging mutually interesting information.
An important process applied on social network is
clustering. It extracts closely related groups of nodes called
clusters such that the relationship among nodes of two
diferent clusters is nearly nonexistent. It is a benefcial tool
for social media in the sense that without leaking out private
information like names, addresses, and contact numbers of
individuals, collaborating in a common feld, it can track the
group for a needy person to get help and support from.
Tis paper aims to reveal the efectiveness of existing
clustering techniques, currently used in social networks, on
social Pocket Switched Networks (PSN) [1]. PSN comprises
of handheld mobile devices where there is no infrastructure
like cellular technology and Internet and where owners have
to depend upon bluetooth or Wi-Fi radios to connect with
other persons.
PSN cannot use traditional routing protocols due to
lack of continuous end-to-end connectivity compared to
traditional networks. In PSN, communication is performed
by opportunistic meeting of mobile devices’ owners. Tis
meeting enables devices to come within each other’s range
and exchange messages. In order to avoid the burden on
resources and perform efcient transmission of message
towards destination, the stable social relationship of the
owners of the portable devices is exploited.
To forward messages only to those neighbors that can
access destination device one has to identify nodes that are
members of destination cluster. Tis demarcation of clusters
helps in efcient and scalable routing as is done in CRHC
[2] which is a hierarchical cluster-based scheme proposed in
order to handle routing in a large, complex, and disrupted
network. Similar is the case with ACHR (Adaptive Clustering
Hierarchy Routing) [3] which is a hybrid hierarchical and
cluster oriented scheme where nodes detect their clusters
using local information with two-hop local visibility. In
Hindawi Publishing Corporation
International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks
Volume 2015, Article ID 239591, 6 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/239591