Profile-based Query Routing in a Mobile Social Network

Recently, there has been an increasing interest in a social network. In a social network, nodes and links represent participants and their friendships, respectively. We have designed and implemented a query propagation mechanism and its applications to realize a social network composed by cellular phone users. In these applications, users can retrieve information from their friends or their friends’ friends by propagating the query in the network. To propagate a query in a wide range and improve the query success ratio, most users who receive the query must relay it to all their friends. However, this increases communication packets. In this paper, we propose a query routing method to decrease the number of communication packets by using user profiles.