Mobile traffic offloading by exploiting social network services and leveraging opportunistic device-to-device sharing

Abstract

The ever increasing traffic demand is becomming a serious concern for mobile network operators. In order to solve the traffic explosion problem, there have been research efforts on offloading the traffic from cellular links to local communications among users. In this article, we leverage opportunistic device-to-device sharing, exploit the social impact among users in social network services (SNSs), and propose the novel framework of traffic offloading assisted by SNSs via opportunistic sharing in mobile social networks, called TOSS. In TOSS, initially a subset of mobile users are selected as seeds depending on their content spreading impact on online SNSs and their mobility patterns in offline MSNs. Then users share content objects via opportunistic local connectivity (e.g., WiFi Direct) with each other. Furthermore, the observation of SNS user activities reveals that individual users have distinct access patterns, which allows TOSS to utilize the user-dependent access delays between the content generation time and each user's access time for opportunistic sharing purposes. By trace-driven evaluation, we demonstrate that TOSS can reduce by 63.8-86.5 percent of cellular traffic while satisfying the access delay requirements of all users. Therefore, traffic offloading by leveraging opportunistic deviceto- device sharing based on SNSs can be quite effective and efficient as a promising content delivery service for traffic reduction in future mobile networks.