Disseminating authorized content via data analysis in opportunistic social networks

Authorized content is a type of content that can be generated only by a certain Content Provider (CP). The content copies delivered to a user may bring rewards to the CP if the content is adopted by the user. The overall reward obtained by the CP depends on the user’s degree of interest in the content and the user’s role in disseminating the content copies. Thus, to maximize the reward, the content provider is motivated to disseminate the authorized content to the most interested users. In this paper, we study how to effectively disseminate the authorized content in Interest-centric Opportunistic Social Networks (IOSNs) such that the reward is maximized. We first derive Social Connection Pattern (SCP) data to handle the challenging opportunistic connections in IOSNs and statistically analyze the interest distribution of the users contacted or connected. The SCP is used to predict the interests of possible contactors and connectors. Then, we propose our SCP-based Dissemination (SCPD) algorithm to calculate the optimum number of content copies to disseminate when two users meet. Our dataset based simulation shows that our SCPD algorithm is effective and efficient to disseminate the authorized content in IOSNs.