Enabling mobile distributed social networking on smartphones

  • Authors:

  • Kanchana Thilakarathna;Henrik Petander;Julián Mestre;Aruna Seneviratne

  • Affiliations:

  • NICTA & UNSW, Sydney, Australia;NICTA & UNSW, Sydney, Australia;USYD, Sydney, Australia;NICTA & UNSW, Sydney, Australia

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 15th ACM international conference on Modeling, analysis and simulation of wireless and mobile systems
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Distributed social networking services show promise to solve data ownership and privacy problems associated with centralised approaches. Smartphones could be used for hosting and sharing users data in a distributed manner, if the associated high communication costs and battery usage issues of the distributed systems could be mitigated. We propose a novel mechanism for reducing these costs to a level comparable with centralised systems by using a connectivity aware replication strategy. To this end, we develop an algorithm based on a combination of bipartite b-matching and a greedy heuristics for grouping devices into tribes among intended content consumers. The tribes replicate content and serve it using low-cost network connections by exploiting time elasticity of user generated content sharing. The performance is evaluated using three real world trace data sets. The results show that a persistent low-cost network availability can be achieved with an average of two replicas per content. Additionally, a content creator can reduce 3G traffic by up to 43% and device energy use by up to 41% on average compared to content sharing in non-mobile-optimised distributed social networking approaches. Moreover, the results show that the proposed mechanism can provide the benefits of a distributed content sharing system for monetary and energy costs comparable to those of a centralised server based system.