Friendships in the air: Integrating social links into wireless network modeling, routing, and analysis

摘要

Social connections among network users have been well investigated as an additional opportunity in network design, such as in routing strategies and trusted networking. This paper presents a paradigm shift that explores the design and performance analysis of combining social links jointly with communication links to support message delivery in wireless networks. In a combined social and communication network, communication links are based on conventional wireless technologies (e.g., WiFi, Bluetooth) and social links are overlaid over a communication infrastructure (e.g., cellular network) that provides a complementary way for data transmission. The goal is to characterize the performance analytically when routing is designed by combining social and communication links. A distance discretization technique is applied to model the reliability and delay of the end-to-end message delivery, and a testbed is implemented with actual radios and real-world social network datasets to measure the performance of a heterogeneous network with social and communication links. The results presented via analysis and testbed experiments provide important insights on message delivery in a combined social and communication network and the developed analytical foundation enables network inference to improve the performance of message delivery.