Interest-Aware Delivery for Mobile Social Networks: A TRACE-driven Approach

We envision future mobile networks to be human-centric supporting interest-aware delivery, where an interest maybe based on behavior, such as mobility pattern, location, or web browsing (or user profile) such as affiliation, attributes, or activity. An essential capability in future networks will be the ability to provide scalable group communication. Current communication paradigms, including unicast and multicast, require explicit identification of destination nodes (through node IDs or group membership protocols), while directory services translate logical, interest-specific queries into destination IDs where parties are then connected using interest-oblivious protocols. The power and scalability of such paradigms is quite limited in the context of future, highly dynamic mobile social networks, where it is desirable in many scenarios to support implicit membership based on interest. In such scenarios, membership in interest-groups is not explicitly expressed by users, it is rather autonomously inferred by network protocols based on behavioral profiles. This removes the dependence on third parties (via directory lookup), the need for explicit expression of interest (or human intervention), and minimizes delivery overhead to uninterested users. While existing types of social networks will likely evolve in the context of mobile networks, we provide a novel paradigm of communication, deviating significantly from existing approaches and subsequently enabling qualitatively different capabilities for future services in mobile societies. In addition, our services and protocol design philosophy begins by analyzing the context in which the service is to be deployed, unlike most existing wireless networking approaches of designing general purpose protocols.