Integrating Social Links into Wireless Networks: Modeling, Routing, Analysis, and Evaluation

Social connections among network nodes have been well investigated as an additional opportunity in network design (e.g., in routing strategies and trusted networking). This paper presents a paradigm shift that explores the design and performance analysis of combining social links jointly with communication links for message delivery in wireless networks. In a combined multi-layer social and communication network, communication links are based on conventional wireless technologies (e.g., WiFi, Bluetooth) and social links are overlaid over a communication infrastructure (e.g., cellular network) that provides an alternative way for data transmission. The goal is to characterize the performance analytically when routing is designed by combining social and communication links. A distance discretization technique is applied to model the reliability and delay of message delivery. The analytical foundation is developed to analyze the end-to-end delay and success probability under various effects of persistent transmission, potential error in distance estimation, and mobility. Systematic routing strategies that employ network inference are then designed to improve the performance in different aspects, such as delivery delay, delivery success probability, and energy-saving. A network emulation testbed is implemented with actual radios and real-world social network datasets to measure the performance of a heterogeneous network with social and communication links. The results in this paper show that the integration of social links in wireless network routing as a multi-layer design leads to substantial performance improvement for delay and reliability of message delivery.