Node mobility and end-to-end disconnections in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) greatly impair the effectiveness of data dissemination. Although social-based approaches can be used to address the problem, most existing solutions only focus on forwarding data to a single destination. In this paper, we are the first to study multicast in DTNs from the social network perspective. We study multicast in DTNs with single and multiple data items, investigate the essential difference between multicast and unicast in DTNs, and formulate relay selections for multicast as a unified knapsack problem by exploiting node centrality and social community structures. Extensive trace-driven simulations show that our approach has similar delivery ratio and delay to the Epidemic routing, but can significantly reduce the data forwarding cost measured by the number of relays used.

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Multicasting in delay tolerant networks: a social network perspective

Understanding human mobility is crucial for a broad range of applications from disease prediction to communication networks. Most efforts on studying human mobility have so far used private and low resolution data, such as call data records. Here, we propose Twitter as a proxy for human mobility, as it relies on publicly available data and provides high resolution positioning when users opt to geotag their tweets with their current location. We analyse a Twitter dataset with more than six million geotagged tweets posted in Australia, and we demonstrate that Twitter can be a reliable source for studying human mobility patterns. Our analysis shows that geotagged tweets can capture rich features of human mobility, such as the diversity of movement orbits among individuals and of movements within and between cities. We also find that short- and long-distance movers both spend most of their time in large metropolitan areas, in contrast with intermediate-distance movers’ movements, reflecting the impact of different modes of travel. Our study provides solid evidence that Twitter can indeed be a useful proxy for tracking and predicting human movement.

/pdf/understanding-human-mobility-from-twitter-1i2hx4cyi7.pdf

Understanding Human Mobility from Twitter

3G networks are currently overloaded, due to the increasing popularity of various applications for smartphones. Offloading mobile data traffic through opportunistic communications is a promising solution to partially solve this problem, because there is almost no monetary cost for it. We propose to exploit opportunistic communications to facilitate information dissemination in the emerging Mobile Social Networks (MoSoNets) and thus reduce the amount of mobile data traffic. As a case study, we investigate the target-set selection problem for information delivery. In particular, we study how to select the target set with only k users, such that we can minimize the mobile data traffic over cellular networks. We propose three algorithms, called Greedy, Heuristic, and Random, for this problem and evaluate their performance through an extensive trace-driven simulation study. Our simulation results verify the efficiency of these algorithms for both synthetic and real-world mobility traces. For example, the Heuristic algorithm can offload mobile data traffic by up to 73.66 percent for a real-world mobility trace. Moreover, to investigate the feasibility of opportunistic communications for mobile phones, we implement a proof-of-concept prototype, called Opp-off, on Nokia N900 smartphones, which utilizes their Bluetooth interface for device/service discovery and content transfer.

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Mobile Data Offloading through Opportunistic Communications and Social Participation

The past few years have seen intensive research efforts carried out in some apparently unrelated areas of dynamic systems – delay-tolerant networks, opportunistic-mobility networks and social networks – obtaining closely related insights. Indeed, the concepts discovered in these investigations can be viewed as parts of the same conceptual universe, and the formal models proposed so far to express some specific concepts are the components of a larger formal description of this universe. The main contribution of this paper is to integrate the vast collection of concepts, formalisms and results found in the literature into a unified framework, which we call time-varying graphs TVGs. Using this framework, it is possible to express directly in the same formalism not only the concepts common to all those different areas, but also those specific to each. Based on this definitional work, employing both existing results and original observations, we present a hierarchical classification of TVGs; each class corresponds to a significant property examined in the distributed computing literature. We then examine how TVGs can be used to study the evolution of network properties, and propose different techniques, depending on whether the indicators for these properties are atemporal as in the majority of existing studies or temporal. Finally, we briefly discuss the introduction of randomness in TVGs.

/pdf/time-varying-graphs-and-dynamic-networks-4aylji9nmh.pdf

Time-varying graphs and dynamic networks

In this article we discuss the state of the art of (mobile) multihop ad hoc networking. This paradigm has often been identified with the solutions developed inside the IETF MANET working group, and for this reason it is called the MANET paradigm. However, they do not coincide, and in the last decade they clearly diverged. In this article, we start from the reasons why the MANET paradigm did not have a major impact on computer communications, and we discuss the evolution of the multihop ad hoc networking paradigm by building on the lessons learned from the MANET research. Specifically, we analyze four successful networking paradigms, mesh, sensor, opportunistic, and vehicular networks, that emerged from the MANET world as a more pragmatic application of the multihop ad hoc networking paradigm. We also present the new research directions in the multihop ad hoc networking field: peoplecentric networking, triggered by the increasing penetration of the smartphones in everyday life, which is generating a people-centric revolution in computing and communications.

Mobile ad hoc networking: milestones, challenges, and new research directions

We study data transfer opportunities between wireless devices carried by humans. We observe that the distribution of the intercontact time (the time gap separating two contacts between the same pair of devices) may be well approximated by a power law over the range [10 minutes; 1 day]. This observation is confirmed using eight distinct experimental data sets. It is at odds with the exponential decay implied by the most commonly used mobility models. In this paper, we study how this newly uncovered characteristic of human mobility impacts one class of forwarding algorithms previously proposed. We use a simplified model based on the renewal theory to study how the parameters of the distribution impact the performance in terms of the delivery delay of these algorithms. We make recommendations for the design of well-founded opportunistic forwarding algorithms in the context of human-carried devices

/pdf/impact-of-human-mobility-on-opportunistic-forwarding-46zeuyk4ja.pdf

Pan Hu

Papers

Impact of Human Mobility on Opportunistic Forwarding Algorithms