Bandwidth allocation in wireless networks employing social distance aware utility functions

Social networks have been rapidly grown over the last years. The critical socio-technical information they move through may be exploited to improve network performance. This is of utmost importance, especially in Next Generation Networks (NGNs) which provide numerous services with increased bandwidth requirements. In this paper, resource allocation in a bottleneck NGN link is investigated. A utility based technique is proposed where the utility function employed is modified; so as to incorporate the information obtained from an overlaid social network as expressed by an appropriately defined by the users average popularity. Then, the users resource allocation problem is formulated as an optimization problem under inequality constraints. Due to the increased complexity of the problem, the optimal bandwidth allocation is estimated numerically. The relevant results demonstrate the high impact of the social distance parameter on bandwidth allocation.