Mobile social networking through friend-to-friend opportunistic content dissemination

We focus on dissemination of content for delay tolerant applications, (i.e. content sharing, advertisement propagation, etc.) where users are geographically clustered into communities. We propose a novel architecture that addresses the issues of lack of trust, delivery latency, loss of user control, and privacy-aware distributed mobile social networking by combining the advantages of decentralized storage and opportunistic communications. The content is to be replicated on friends' devices who are likely to consume the content. The fundamental challenge is to minimize the number of replicas whilst ensuring high and timely availability. We propose a greedy heuristic algorithm for computationally hard content replication problem to replicate content in well-selected users, to maximize the content dissemination with limited number of replication. Using both real world and synthetic traces, we show the viability of the proposed scheme.