Contract Mechanism and Performance Analysis for Data Transaction in Mobile Social Networks

• Published in: IEEE transactions on network science and engineering Vol. 6; no. 2; pp. 103 - 115
• Main Authors: Du, Jun, Jiang, Chunxiao, Han, Zhu, Zhang, Haijun, Mumtaz, Shahid, Ren, Yong
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 01.04.2019; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: auction; Auctions; Computer simulation; contract mechanism; Contracts; Data models; Data transaction; Mobile communication; Mobile computing; mobile social networks; Smart phones; Smartphones; Social network services; Social networks; social relationship aware; Wireless fidelity; Wireless networks
• ISSN: 2327-4697; 2334-329X
• DOI: 10.1109/TNSE.2017.2787746

In this paper, a novel mobile data offloading method is proposed based on an external-infrastructure-free approach. Specifically, through the hotspot function of smartphones, data demands from some mobile users, who have used out the data with their monthly data plans, can be offloaded by some other mobile users who still have redundant unused data. In order to model this data transaction among mobile users, which can be realized with assistance of current mobile social platforms, we introduce an auction-based contract mechanism, and then we further analyze the system performance. To improve the efficiency and performance of the system, a socially-aware mobility model is also designed. In this model, betweenness of the data auctioneers is introduced, according to which the number of data requesters in different auctions can be balanced and the performance of the system can be optimized. The proposed data transaction mechanisms and friendship-aware mobility model are then simulated as operating on Flickr, a real-world online social network database. Results show that the number of data bidders in different auctions can be balanced effectively through the proposed mobility model, and the income per unit time of sellers in the networked data transaction can also be increased.