VIP delegation: Enabling VIPs to offload data in wireless social mobile networks

Abstract

We propose the use of opportunistic delegation as a data traffic offload solution to the recent boost up of mobile data consumption in metropolitan areas, by investigating two main questions: (i) “How to gain insights into social mobile networking scenarios?” and (ii) “How to utilize such insights to design solutions to alleviate overloaded 3G networks?”. The purpose of our solution is to leverage usage of mobile applications requiring large data transfers by channeling the traffic to a few, socially selected important users in the network called VIP delegates. The proposed VIP selection strategies are based on social network properties and are compared to the optimal solution (that covers 100% of users with minimum number of VIPs). Our extensive experiments with real and synthetic traces show the effectiveness of VIP delegation both in terms of coverage and required number of VIPs - down to 7% in average of VIPs are needed in campuslike scenarios to offload about 90% of the traffic.