Proximate Sharing of Geo Data Downloading Based on the MSNP-Oriented Ubiquitous Machine-to-Machine (M2M) Communication Paradigm

A mobile social network in proximity (MSNP) allows persons who: 1) belong to the same mobile social network in the cyber space: and 2) are proximate with each other in the physical world to share information, e.g., point of interests’ (POI) data during the touring journey, in a ubiquitous way. This paper proposed a clustering scheme called credit-centric sharing of POIs’ data to organize the handheld devices of mobile users, who belong to the same MSNP group in the cyber space and are proximate with each other in the physical world, i.e., these mobile users’ handheld devices are within the Wi-Fi hot spot’s signal coverage of the cluster leader’s handheld device, as a cluster of mobile Internet of Things (IOT). These mobile IOTs use the user-transparent machine-to-machine communication way for clustering and POIs’ proximity-aware data sharing. Then, the selected cluster head can trigger the downloading of POIs’ data using the 3G/3.5G/4G cellular network based on the current geographical position and then forwarding these data to all cluster members using the Wi-Fi network. In this way, instead of having each mobile user to individually download nearby POIs’ data through his handheld device’s 3G/3.5G/4G cellular network, which needs to download n times of the same POIs’ data through Internet if the cluster has n mobile users’ handheld devices, it only needs to download the corresponding POIs’ data once through the cluster leader’s 3G/3.5G/4G cellular network and then shares these data to other cluster members using the Wi-Fi network. The performance analysis shows that the proposed method can reduce both 3G/3.5G/4G cellular network’s traffic load and the power consumption of involved mobile users’ handheld devices based on the cyber-physical-social computing and networking way.