Energy Sharing based Content Delivery in Mobile Social Networks

In mobile social networks, the mobility and connectivity of nodes are often non-deterministic. Source and destination nodes may not have a meeting opportunity and the content dissemination and delivery most of the time require the cooperation of nodes. However, this causes nodes spend energy, thus, they may be reluctant to participate in the dissemination process to conserve energy. One approach to motivate user participation is to transfer energy for their service so that their potential loss is compensated. However, this makes routing problem much challenging as the source node needs to decide not only the best relay nodes but also the amount of energy transfer to them. In this paper, we study this energy sharing based content delivery problem in mobile social networks. To this end, we assume that a node is willing to carry the content as long as the energy received for this delivery lasts, after which it drops the content (i.e., time-to-live). We utilize optimal stopping theory and dynamic programming to model the content delivery problem under this energy sharing paradigm between the nodes. The simulation results show that energy sharing based content delivery can potentially increase the routing performance under certain settings.