User generated content dissemination in mobile social networks through infrastructure supported content replication

User generated content in mobile social networks such as news items, promotion coupons and traffic updates, are typically short-lived in time and space. Therefore, opportunistic communication as such may not be suitable for user generated content dissemination in mobile social networks due to high content delivery delays. To address the timeliness of the delivery, we propose a hybrid content dissemination strategy, which makes use of available networking infrastructure to replicate content on smartphones, and leverages these replicators to propagate the content to others via opportunistic communication. Using trace-driven simulations, we show that the content can be delivered to all users in a mobile social network within required time bounds by replicating content using infrastructure to only 10% of the consumers. Furthermore, due to the high rate of timely content delivery, the proposed hybrid content dissemination scheme ultimately saves approximately 60% of the infrastructure bandwidth usage compared to traditional opportunistic dissemination in general MSN environments. In addition, the replication strategies proposed in the paper are robust enough to deliver the same performance even with low collaboration of consumers for replication. Crown Copyright (C) 2014 Published by Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.