OCC: Opportunistic crowd computing in mobile social networks

Abstract

Crowd computing is a new paradigm, in which a group of users are coordinated to deal with a huge job or huge amounts of data that one user cannot easily do. In this paper, we design an Opportunistic Crowd Computing system (OCC) for mobile social networks (MSNs). Unlike traditional crowd computing systems, the mobile users in OCC move around and communicate each other by using short-distance wireless communication mechanisms (e.g., WiFi or Bluetooth) when they encounter each other, so as to save communication costs. The key design of OCC is the task assignment scheme. Unlike the traditional crowd computing task assignment problem, the task assignment in OCC must take into consideration the users’ mobile behaviors. To solve this problem, we present an optimal user group algorithm (OUGA). It can minimize the total cost, while ensuring the task completion rates. Moreover, we conduct a performance analysis, and prove the optimality of this algorithm. In addition, the simulations show that our algorithm achieves a good performance.