Suo: Social reciprocity based cooperative mobile data traffic communication

Abstract

The widespread of mobile applications tightens wireless users’ social relationships and encourages them to generate more data traffic under network effects. This boosts the demand for wireless services yet may challenge users’ limited wireless capacities and budgets. In this paper, we employ collaborative communication services to address this challenge, by considering the network effect in a social-aware environment. Specifically, we develop an optimization model, namely SUO, for the problem formulation. Furthermore, we then propose a distributed update algorithm for users to reach the optimal decisions. We evaluate the performance of our proposed algorithm by numerical studies using real data, and thereby draw useful engineering insights for the operation of wireless providers.