The Design and Evaluation of An Information Sharing System for Human Networks

With fast-growing consumer demands and rapidly-developing mobile technologies, portable mobile devices are becoming a necessity of our daily lives. However, existing mobile devices rely on the wireless infrastructure to access Internet services provided by central application providers. This architecture is inefficient in many situations and also does not utilize abundant interdevice communication opportunities in many scenarios. This paper proposes the human network (HUNET), a network architecture that enables information sharing between mobile devices through direct interdevice communication. We design B-SUB, an interest-driven information sharing system for HUNETs. In B-SUB, content and user interests are described by tags, which are human-readable strings that are designated by users. An experiment is performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of this tag-based content description method. To facilitate efficient data dissemination, we invent the Temporal Counting Bloom filter (TCBF) to encode tags, which also reduces the overhead of content routing. Comprehensive theoretical analyses on the parameter tuning of B-SUB are presented and verify B-SUB's ability to work efficiently under various network conditions. We then extend B-SUB's routing scheme to provide a stronger privacy guarantee. Extensive real-world trace-driven simulations are performed to evaluate the performance of B-SUB, and the results demonstrate its efficiency and usefulness.