Friendships in the air: Integrating social links into wireless network modeling, routing, and analysis
Zhuo Lu, Yalin E. Sagduyu, Yi Shi · 2016
Social connections among network users have been well investigated as an additional opportunity in network design, such as in routing strategies and trusted networking. This paper presents a paradigm shift that explores the design and performance analysis of combining social links jointly with communication links to support message delivery in wireless networks. In a combined social and communication network, communication links are based on conventional wireless technologies (e.g., WiFi, Bluetooth) and social links are overlaid over a communication infrastructure (e.g., cellular network) that provides a complementary way for data transmission. The goal is to characterize the performance analytically when routing is designed by combining social and communication links. A distance discretization technique is applied to model the reliability and delay of the end-to-end message delivery, and a testbed is implemented with actual radios and real-world social network datasets to measure the performance of a heterogeneous network with social and communication links. The results presented via analysis and testbed experiments provide important insights on message delivery in a combined social and communication network and the developed analytical foundation enables network inference to improve the performance of message delivery.