TASA: traffic offloading by tag-assisted social-aware opportunistic sharing in mobile social networks

To solve the mobile traffic explosion problem, there have been many efforts to try to offload the mobile traffic from infrastructured cellular links to direct local short-range communications among users. In this paper, we propose a novel framework of traffic offloading by Tag-Assisted Social-Aware opportunistic sharing in mobile social networks, TASA, to offload traffic by device-to-device sharing. Based on the evaluation of the tags of users and contents, we select a subset of users who are likely to receive the same content as initial seeds depending on their spreading impacts in online SNSs and their mobility patterns in offline MSNs. Then users share the content via opportunistic local connectivity (e.g., Bluetooth, Wi-Fi Direct, LTE D2D) with each other. The observation from SNS activities reveals that individual users have distinct access patterns, which allows TASA to further exploit the user-dependent access delay between the content generation time and each users access time for traffic offloading purposes. We model and analyze the traffic offloading and content spreading among users by taking into account various options in linking SNS and MSN trace data. The trace-driven evaluation demonstrates that TASA can reduce up to 78.9% of the cellular traffic.