Opportunistic Mobile Social Networks at Work
Opportunistic networks exploit human mobility and consequent device-to-device ad hoc contacts to disseminate content in a ”store-carry-forward” fashion. In opportunistic networks, disconnections and highly variable delays caused by human mobility are the norm. Another major challenge in opportunistic communications arises from the small form factor of mobile devices which introduces resource limitations compared to static computing systems. Lastly, human mobility and social interactions have a large impact on the structure and performance of opportunistic networks, hence, understanding these phenomena is crucial for the design of efficient algorithms and applications.
In this work, we take an experimental approach to better understand opportunistic mobile social networks. We design and implement of MobiClique, a communication middleware for opportunistic mobile social networking. MobiClique takes advantage of user mobility and social relationships to forward messages in an opportunistic manner. We perform a large-scale MobiClique experiment with 80 people, where we collect social network information (i.e. their Facebook profiles), and ad hoc contact and communication traces. We use the collected data with three other data sets to analyse in detail epidemic content dissemination in opportunistic networks. Most of the related works have focused on the pairwise contact history among users in conference or campus environments. We claim that given the density of these networks, this approach leads to a biased understanding of the content dissemination process. We design a methodology to break the contact traces down into “temporal communities”, i.e., groups of people who meet periodically during an experiment. We show that these communities correlate with people’s social communities. As in previous works, we observe that efficient content dissemination is mostly due to high contact rate users. However, we show that high contact rate users that are more frequently involved in temporal communities contribute less to the dissemination process, leading us to conjecture that social communities tend to limit the efficiency of content dissemination in opportunistic mobile social networks.