  Several social-aware forwarding strategies have been recently introduced in
opportunistic networks, and proved effective in considerably in- creasing
routing performance through extensive simulation studies based on real-world
data. However, this performance improvement comes at the expense of storing a
considerable amount of state information (e.g, history of past encounters) at
the nodes. Hence, whether the benefits on routing performance comes directly
from the social-aware forwarding mechanism, or indirectly by the fact state
information is exploited is not clear. Thus, the question of whether
social-aware forwarding by itself is effective in improving opportunistic
network routing performance remained unaddressed so far. In this paper, we give
a first, positive answer to the above question, by investigating the expected
message delivery time as the size of the net- work grows larger.
