  Reliable social connectivity and transmission of data for popular nodes is
vital in multihop Ad-hoc Social Networks (ASNETs). In this networking paradigm,
transmission unreliability could be caused by multiple social applications
running on a single node. This leads to contentions among nodes and connection
paths. In addition, congestions can be the result of multiple senders
transmitting data to a single receiver and every sender waiting for a positive
acknowledgment to move on. Therefore, traditional Transmission Control Protocol
(TCP) performs poorly in ASNETs, due to the fact that the available bandwidth
is shared among nodes using round trip time and the acknowledgment is provided
individually to every data packet. To solve these issues, we propose a
technique, called Overhead Control with Reliable Transmission of Popular
Packets in Ad-Hoc Social Networks (RTPS), which improves transmission
reliability by assigning bandwidth to users based on their popularity levels:
extra bandwidth is assigned to the nodes with higher popularity and their
acknowledgments are sent with higher priority. In addition, RTPS further
reduces contentions and packet losses by delaying acknowledgment packet
transmissions. Our detailed investigations demonstrate the excellent
performance of RTPS in terms of throughput latency and overhead with different
hop-distances and different numbers of concurrent TCP flows.
