Friendships in the air: Integrating social links into wireless network modeling, routing, and analysis

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.

[1]  Yi Shi,et al.  Search delay and success in combined social and communication networks , 2013, 2013 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM).

[2]  J. Dall,et al.  Random geometric graphs. , 2002, Physical review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics.

[3]  Kang Chen,et al.  SMART: Lightweight distributed Social Map based Routing in Delay Tolerant Networks , 2012, 2012 20th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP).

[4]  Paolo Santi,et al.  Social-aware stateless forwarding in pocket switched networks , 2011, 2011 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM.

[5]  Haiying Shen,et al.  Social-P2P: Social network-based P2P file sharing system , 2012, 2012 20th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP).

[6]  Michael A. Jensen,et al.  Secret Key Establishment Using Temporally and Spatially Correlated Wireless Channel Coefficients , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing.

[7]  Duncan J. Watts,et al.  Collective dynamics of ‘small-world’ networks , 1998, Nature.

[8]  Albert,et al.  Emergence of scaling in random networks , 1999, Science.

[9]  Kevin Zhou.  Navigation in a small world , 2017 .

[10]  Qinghua Li,et al.  Routing in Socially Selfish Delay Tolerant Networks , 2010, 2010 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM.

[11]  Jie Wu,et al.  Social feature-based multi-path routing in delay tolerant networks , 2012, 2012 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM.

[12]  Cecilia Mascolo,et al.  Socially-aware routing for publish-subscribe in delay-tolerant mobile ad hoc networks , 2008, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications.

[13]  Ke Xu,et al.  A Survey of Social-Aware Routing Protocols in Delay Tolerant Networks: Applications, Taxonomy and Design-Related Issues , 2014, IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials.

[14]  Wade Trappe,et al.  Radio-telepathy: extracting a secret key from an unauthenticated wireless channel , 2008, MobiCom '08.

[15]  Sebastian Schnettler,et al.  A structured overview of 50 years of small-world research , 2009, Soc. Networks.

[16]  Kathleen M. Carley,et al.  Routing through an integrated communication and social network , 2009, MILCOM 2009 - 2009 IEEE Military Communications Conference.

[17]  Xiaohui Liang,et al.  STAP: A social-tier-assisted packet forwarding protocol for achieving receiver-location privacy preservation in VANETs , 2011, 2011 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM.

[18]  H. Vincent Poor,et al.  Delay of Social Search on Small-world Random Geometric Graphs , 2009 .

[19]  Franck Legendre,et al.  Social Trust in Opportunistic Networks , 2010, 2010 INFOCOM IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops.

[20]  H. Vincent Poor,et al.  Average Message Delivery Time for Small-World Networks in the Continuum Limit , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.