Throughput and delay analysis of wireless multicast in distributed mobile social networks based on geographic social relationships

Since mobile communications exhibit strong social characteristics, based on the potential common interests of mobile users, mobile social networks (MSNs) are capable of mitigating the tele-traffic bottleneck. By multicasting the content of common interest from a content owner to content seekers within the owner's transmission range, a distributed MSNs architecture is proposed, which is capable of mitigating the tele-traffic imposed on network operators. In this contribution, the social relationship between a pair of MSN users is defined according to their geographic characteristics. By jointly considering the geographic social relationships and the wireless propagation environment, we derive the closed-form equations for evaluating both the throughput and delay of the social unicast/multicast transmissions. Simulation results are provided, both for supporting our theoretical analysis, as well as for investigating the impact of social relationships on the achievable network performance. Based on the results presented, we conclude that a more socially-minded content owner is particularly efficient in multicasting the content of common interest to content seekers.