Opportunistic social dissemination of micro-blogs

Through web sites such as Twitter, micro-blogging has shown a remarkable growth, demonstrating the human desire to share and consume information and knowledge. At the same time, the capabilities of mobile devices such as smart phones has considerably increased, opening up new ways to communicate and share content. In particular it is becoming feasible that mobile devices can directly share content such as micro-blogs without Internet infrastructure. This offers advantages in terms of scalability, and for micro-blogs in particular, it offers the potential to provide content relevant to the end user without explicit subscriptions. To facilitate this, we propose a totally decentralised push-based scheme for intelligent micro-blogging from mobile devices based on opportunistic networking. This is achieved through mobile devices building interest profiles relevant to communities induced by frequent social interactions. These interest profiles allow the devices to prioritise forwarding the micro-blog payloads that maximise the utility received by others. Detailed simulation studies determine the parameters that affect system performance and demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms basic dissemination strategies in terms of the relevance of the received information.