Preference-aware content dissemination in opportunistic mobile social networks

• Published in: 2012 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM pp. 1960 - 1968
• Main Authors: Lin, K. C-J, Chun-Wei Chen, Cheng-Fu Chou
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.03.2012
• Subjects: Broadcasting; Mobile communication; Mobile computing; Protocols; Schedules; Social network services; Unicast
• ISBN: 9781467307734; 1467307734
• ISSN: 0743-166X
• DOI: 10.1109/INFCOM.2012.6195573

As mobile devices have become more ubiquitous, mobile users increasingly expect to utilize proximity-based connectivity, e.g., WiFi and Bluetooth, to opportunistically share multimedia content based on their personal preferences. However, many previous studies investigate content dissemination protocols that distribute a single object to as many users in an opportunistic mobile social network as possible without considering user preference. In this paper, we propose PrefCast, a preference-aware content dissemination protocol that targets on maximally satisfying user preference for content objects. Due to non-persistent connectivity between users in a mobile social network, when a user meets neighboring users for a limited contact duration, it needs to efficiently disseminate a suitable set of objects that can bring possible future contacts a high utility (the quantitative metric of preference satisfaction). We formulate such a problem as a maximum-utility forwarding model, and propose an algorithm that enables each user to predict how much utility it can contribute to future contacts and solve its optimal forwarding schedule in a distributed manner. Our trace-based evaluation shows that PrefCast can produce a 18.5% and 25.2% higher average utility than the protocols that only consider contact frequency or preference of local contacts, respectively.