Energy-Efficient Cross-Layer Design of Wireless Mesh Networks for Content Sharing in Online Social Networks

Bearing in mind the associated security and privacy concerns, users in an online social network (OSN) normally communicate with their direct friends. We propose an energy-efficient cross-layer design for wireless mesh network (WMN) aided content sharing in OSN as a case study of the interplay between OSNs and technological networks. A power control aided WMN is proposed for energy-efficient content sharing. Based on our power control scheme in the physical layer, an interference-constrained-channel-reuse scheme and a Dijkstra algorithm aided energy-efficient routing protocol are invoked for the medium access control layer and for the network layer, respectively. Inspired by the tool of social network analysis, both the singular and composite betweenness metrics are invoked for quantifying the duty-cycle of mesh routers. The former only considers the topology of the mesh backbone, while the latter considers the topologies of both the OSN and the WMN. Furthermore, the singular/composite betweenness is exploited for designing sophisticated caching strategies in order to improve the content sharing performance. We demonstrate that our caching strategies are capable of reducing the total energy dissipation by as much as ${\text{40}}\%$. Specifically, the composite betweenness based caching strategy is capable of reducing the energy dissipation of the mesh clients by ${\text{358}}\%$, compared to its singular betweenness based counterpart.