Socially Aware Integrated Centralized Infrastructure and Opportunistic Networking: A Powerful Content Dissemination Catalyst

The classic centralized infrastructure (CI) exhibits low efficiency in disseminating the content of common interest across its requesters. In order to overcome the limitations of CI-based content dissemination, smart mobile devices are capable of activating direct opportunistic communications among mobile users, which returns in integrated cellular and opportunistic networks. During the content dissemination process, the social characteristics of multiple users, including their common interest in the content, their mobility patterns, their social ties, and their altruistic forwarding behaviors, should be carefully considered in order to design an efficient content dissemination scheme. We demonstrate that the integrated network-based content dissemination scheme outperforms its CI-based counterpart in terms of both content delivery ratio and its various energy and delay metrics. Furthermore, the opportunistic network is capable of offloading a large fraction of tele-traffic from the overloaded CI-based network.