Abstract: The popularity of intelligent mobile terminals has greatly promoted the development of mobile social networks (MSNs). As the carrier of the terminal equipment, the human being has the feature of constantly moving which leads to dynamic changes of the network topology and brings many serious problems to MSN routing, such as high latency, low delivery rate and high overhead. In order to promote routing efficiency, based on the content-centric idea in information-centric networking (ICN) and the biogeography-based optimization (BBO) algorithm, an efficient BBO-inspired MSN routing algorithm with information-centric paradigm support (BIRI) is designed. Firstly, social metrics, social relationship strength and centrality, are redefined to direct BBO algorithm for community detection. Secondly, the novel strategies of content aggregation, data caching and bridge node selection are designed to support the efficient content retrieval and access. Based on these strategies, the enhanced intra-community and inter-community routing processes are proposed to release the interference caused by the mobility of the terminal equipment on data transmission. The proposed BIRI routing algorithm is simulated on the opportunistic network environment (ONE), and compared with other three baseline MSN routing algorithms and analyzed from three aspects of delivery rate, average latency and network overhead ratio. Experimental results show that the proposed BIRI mechanism is feasible and effective.

Key words: mobile social network (MSN), information-centric networking (ICN), biogeography-based optimization (BBO), community detection, social metric, routing algorithm