TOSS: Traffic offloading by social network service-based opportunistic sharing in mobile social networks

The ever increasing traffic demand becomes a serious concern of mobile network operators. To solve this traffic explosion problem, there have been many efforts to offload the traffic from cellular links to direct communications among users. In this paper, we propose the framework of Traffic Offloading assisted by Social network services (SNS) via opportunistic Sharing in mobile social networks, TOSS, to offload SNS-based cellular traffic by user-to-user sharing. First we select a subset of users who are to receive the same content as initial seeds depending on their content spreading impacts in online SNSs and their mobility patterns in offline mobile social networks (MSNs). Then users share the content via opportunistic local connectivity (e.g., Bluetooth, Wi-Fi Direct, Device-to-device in LTE) with each other. The observation of SNS user activities reveals that individual users have distinct access patterns, which allows TOSS to exploit the user-dependent access delay between the content generation time and each user's 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 TOSS can reduce up to 86.5% of the cellular traffic while satisfying the access delay requirements of all users.