Impact of emerging social media applications on mobile networks

Emerging social media applications are expected to cause severe congestion to mobile networks, both mobile core network and mobile radio access network. These social media applications are characterized by the fact that they involve sessions with frequently and dynamically updated content, shared with a potential number of mobile users sharing the same location, or being dispersed over a wide area. A method to dynamically identify such applications/sessions and initiate multicast based delivery of the relevant content is proposed. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated through computer simulations, taking Twitter as an example. Encouraging results are obtained.