| The objective of this thesis is to develop an architectural framework of social community based cooperative caching for minimizing electronic content provisioning cost in Mobile Social Wireless Networks (MSWNET). MSWNETs are formed by wireless mobile devices sharing common interests in electronic content, and physically gathering in public settings such as University campuses, work places, malls, and airports. Cooperative caching in such MSWNETs are shown to be able to reduce content provisioning cost which heavily depends on service and pricing dependencies among various stakeholders including content providers, network service providers, and end consumers. This thesis develops practical network, service, and economic pricing models which are then used for creating an optimal cooperative caching strategy based on social community abstraction in wireless networks. The developed framework includes optimal caching algorithms, analytical models, simulation, and prototype experiments for evaluating performance of the proposed strategy. The main contributions are: 1) formulation of economic cost-reward flow models among the MSWNET stakeholders, 2) developing optimal distributed cooperative caching algorithms, 3) characterizing the impacts of network, user and object dynamics, 4) investigating the impacts of user non-cooperation, and finally 5) developing a prototype Social Wireless Network for evaluating the impacts of cooperative caching in a Mobile Social Wireless Networks. |
