Shared-Resource Management Using Online Social-Relationship Metric for Altruistic Device Sharing

The confluence of two emerging paradigms, Internet of Things and sharing economy, has encouraged people to share their assets, which could include personal devices, with others. Atypical example of such altruistic device sharing is “tethering”in cellular networks: an owner who uses a smartphone relays data from/to base stations for others who do not have direct connectivity to cellular networks. However, when people share devices, they would be concerned about costs such as battery or bandwidth. Device owners generally want to reduce their costs when they share their devices with someone who is less socially close to them. This is because it was reported that our altruistic behavior has clear correlation with social closeness; the less close someone is to you, the less altruistic actions you take towards that person. Therefore, we propose a system that uses online social relationships to meet device owners' demand for shared-resource management to enable altruistic device sharing. By acquiring and evaluating online social relationships between a device owner and user, the proposed system automatically determines how much resources the user is allowed to use. In this paper, we implemented a prototype system to measure its authentication overhead. Using this actual overhead measured on the prototype system, we conducted a simulation with a large-scale data set of a real social network to verify that: 1) the proposed system limits the resource usage for guest users who are not as close to the device owners and 2) the overhead of the authentication process in the proposed system does not interfere with the resource sharing with guest users who are close to the device owners.