Gathering Point-Aided Viral Marketing in Decentralized Mobile Social Networks

Viral marketing is a technique that spreads advertisement information through social networks. Recently, viral marketing through online social networks has achieved huge commercial success. However, there are still very little research reported on viral marketing in decentralized mobile social networks (MSNs). Comparing with online viral marketing, viral marketing in decentralized MSNs faces many challenges, such as unreliable information diffusion and limited network knowledge. To address these problems, we propose the gathering point-aided mobile viral marketing (GP-MVM) scheme, which contains two major components, i.e., seed selection and information diffusion. Seed selection is responsible to select a set of seed nodes from which information diffusion begins. Based on a new metric called integrated contact strength (ICS), we propose two distributed seed selection schemes, i.e., ratio seeding and threshold seeding, while, for information diffusion, we propose the GP-aided diffusion algorithm, which utilizes user GPs to promote information propagation. Continuous-time Markov chain-based analytical model shows that GP-MVM has a good scalability. Simulations indicate that GP-MVM outperforms two state-of-the-art information diffusion methods designed for MSNs, in terms of both diffusion proportion and diffusion speed.