Profile-Cast: Behavior-Aware Mobile Networking

In this paper we advocate a service paradigm, profile-cast, within the communication framework of delay tolerant networks (DTN) (K. Fall, 2003). This novel approach leverages the behavioral patterns of mobile network users for delivering messages to a sub-group of users as defined by their profiles (e.g., interest, social affiliation, etc.). We study large data sets of user mobility profiles and present a case-study of mobility profile-cast with a similarity-based forwarding protocol. We show that behavior-aware protocol design has a great potential - we reduce the total number of transmissions to 45% of flooding under 92% delivery success rate, or to only 3% transmissions of flooding under 61% delivery success rate. It also leads to shorter delay (at least 30% less) as compared to a random transmission protocol.