Data offloading in social mobile networks through VIP delegation

The recent boost up of mobile data consumption is straining cellular networks in metropolitan areas and is the main reason for the ending of unlimited data plans by many providers. To address this problem, we propose the use of series opportunistic delegation as a data traffic offload solution by investigating two main questions: (i) "Can we characterize a given social mobile scenario by observing only a small portion of it?". (ii) "How to exploit this characterization so to design solutions that alleviate overloaded cellular networks?". In our solution we build a social-graph of the given scenario by observing it for a period as short as 1-week, and then leverage a few, socially important users in the social-graph-the VIPs-to offload the network. The proposed VIP selection strategies are based on social network properties and are compared to the optimal (offline) solution. Through extensive evaluations with real and synthetic traces we show the effectiveness of VIP delegation both in terms of coverage and required number of VIPs - down to 7% in average of VIPs are needed in campus-like scenarios to offload about 90% of the traffic. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.