A credit-aware clustering scheme for the proximate sharing of geo data downloading

Mobile Social Network (MSN) can enable many services, such as letting people in an MSN share some useful information during the touring journey. In this work, a clustering scheme is proposed to allow a group of persons, who are in the same MSN and are within the WiFi hot spot' signal coverage of the cluster leader who enables his handheld device's WiFi hot spot function, to share the nearby Point Of Interests' (POIs') data that are downloaded by the cluster leader through his handheld device's 3G/3.5G/4G cellular network interface. That is, it belongs to the proximate sharing of Location-based Service (LBS) data downloading. This work adopts an MSN-based mechanism to organize touring groups in which each group's leader can share his downloaded POIs' data with his group members. A credit-based clustering scheme was proposed to organize a group of users who belong to the MSN and are nearby with each other for a while during their touring journey. In this way, the group leader can get some credits and each group member needs to pay some credits to motivate persons to have the sharing and reach the goal of fairness. Our proposed scheme not only can reach the fairness for the credit concern but also can more evenly distribute power consumption and reduce the power consumption according to the performance analysis.