Data Dissemination Protocols Based on Opportunistic Sharing for Data Offloading in Mobile Social Networks

Abstract

Due to the increasing popularity of smart mobile devices, the amount of mobile data communications has led to explosive growth of data traffic in cellular networks. Cellular networks have to face the challenge of huge communication traffic. Offloading data traffic through opportunistic communication among smart mobile devices is a promising solution to partially solve this problem since there is almost no monetary cost for it. Large amount of smart mobile devices can communicate each other using Bluetooth or WIFI Direct in short communication range and they can form an opportunistic mobile social network. The opportunistic communications among smart mobile devices can effectively reduce the amount of cellular data traffic. However, mobile users take a long time to obtain useful data. In order to reduce data communication latency, this paper proposes three data dissemination protocols named RRDP(Request-Reply Dissemination Protocol), RDP(Random Dissemination Protocol) and LDP(LRU Dissemination Protocol) respectively. The three proposed protocols are based on opportunistic sharing policy. Extensive NS-2 simulation results show that (1) on the campus situation, the user's access delay of RDP is 56.4% less than the RRDP and LDP is 44.8% less than RRDP. (2) in the vehicular environment, the user's access delay of RDP is 32.5% less than the RRDP and LDP is 28.1% less than RRDP. RDP is the best protocol.