Content Dissemination In Mobile Social Networks

The mobile social network (MSN) combines techniques in social science and wireless communication for mobile networking. The MSN can be considered as a system which provides a variety of data delivery services involving the social relationship among mobile users. Content distribution technology is an important means to ensure the reliability and validity of the data delivery services. Routing protocol is one of the key steps to ensure the efficient and reliable data delivery service in the process of content dissemination.Nowadays, many social patterns-based routing protocols have been proposed. Social metrics such as similarity, centrality and community are usually used to compute node’s social utility which is used to evaluate the node’s forwarding ability. Greedy algorithm is used to choose the relay node based on nodes’social utility. In this case, a small proportion of nodes undertake most of the forwarding tasks, resulting in the extreme load unbalance among nodes. In addition, nodes are usually battery-powered. Heavily loaded nodes’energy may be exhausted in a short time, thereby affecting the subsequent forwarding process.In this paper, the reasons of load imbalance phenomenon have been analyzed using mathematical matrix and real datasets. On the one hand, nodes’degree distribution follows the power-law distribution in social networks. It means that a small proportion of nodes have a large number of connections, while most of nodes have a small number of connections. On the other hand, the social pattern-based routing protocols adopt the greedy algorithm to choose the next hop. Nodes with greater social utility have greater probability to be selected as the relay nodes. Considering nodes’energy consumption rate and social utility, an energy-aware social routing protocol (ERMSN) is proposed to solve extreme unbalance problem between nodes’ energy consumption. ERMSN achieve better performance in terms of successful delivery ratio, overhead ratio and fairness index compared with two popular routing protocols.