Contact duration aware evaluation for content dissemination delay in mobile social network

Groups of people with mobile phones using short-range connections such as WiFi and Bluetooth to propagate messages can be modeled as, with regard to regular absence of end-to-end connection, mobile social networks MSNs, which can be exploited to offload a significant amount of mobile content from the overloaded infrastructure networks such as 3G. The study of content transmission delay for the applications of mobile content dissemination in MSNs is an important problem, because to enhance the network capacity, the traffic is offloaded at the cost of inducing longer delay. In contrast to existing works, which ignore the factors of contact duration limits and large content size, we present a contact duration aware framework to model the content dissemination process in MSNs, give an explicit expression for the average content dissemination delay, and reveals its relationship with various system parameters of content size, users' selfishness, number of involved subscribers, infecting ratio, and so on. We apply our proposed model to real-life traces to assess its reliability by comparing the theoretical results with measured statistics and present extensive upshots to evaluate the influence of various parameters on system performance. The results demonstrate the accuracy of our proposed framework and reveal that system parameters of content size, system infecting ratio and intragroup transmission are the most important factors to influence the content dissemination delay. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.