LEVERAGING SOCIAL NETWORKS FOR P2P CONTENT-BASED FILE SHARING IN DISCONNECTED MANETs

Personal mobile devices such as laptops, and smartphones have been more popular in the past few years, The number of smartphone users increased by 118 million across the world in 2007, and is expected to reach around 300 million by 2013. The incredibly rapid growth of mobile users is leading to a promising future, in which they can freely share files between each other whenever and wherever. The number of mobile searching users (through smartphones, feature phones, tablets, etc.) is estimated to reach 901.1 million in 2013. At present, peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing methods in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are classified into three groups: a) flooding-based, b) advertisement-based, and c) social contact-based. The first two groups of methods can easily have high overhead and low scalability. They are developed for connected MANETs, in which end-to-end connectivity among nodes is ensured. The third group of methods adapts to the opportunistic nature of disconnected MANETs but fails to consider the social interests (i.e.,contents) of mobile nodes, which can be exploited to improve the file searching efficiency. This paper proposes a P2P content-based file sharing system, namely SPOON, for disconnected MANETs. The system uses an interest extraction algorithm to derive a node’s interests from its files for content-based file searching. For efficient file searching, SPOON groups common-interest nodes that frequently meet with each other as communities. It takes advantage of node mobility by designating stable nodes, which have the most frequent contact with community members, as community coordinators for intracommunity searching, and highly mobile nodes that visit other communities frequently as community ambassadors for intercommunity searching. Keywords—MANETs, content-based file sharing and social networks