ESD: An energy saving data delivery scheme in mobile social networks

Mobile social network (MSN) is a special kind of delay tolerant network that consists of mobile users with social characteristics. The existing social-aware data delivery algorithms usually ignore the energy cost of devices as well as the time-varying characteristic of user clustering in the vicinity of hotspots, which result in the degradation of the energy efficiency and the delay performance of data delivery in the MSN. This paper proposes an Energy Saving data Delivery (ESD) scheme, which can reduce energy consumption and data delivery delay. Moreover, the optimal number of data copies, the optimal set of destination hotspots and the route paths with the minimum energy cost are derived towards the highest energy efficiency for data delivery in a MSN. Simulation results indicate that the proposed ESD scheme outperforms the existing hotspotbased MSN schemes in terms of both energy cost and delay of data delivery. We also investigate the impact of the community similarity of users on the performance of data delivery.