Socially-Aware Networking: A Survey
(2013)cite arxiv:1312.6552Comment: accepted. IEEE Systems Journal, 2013.DOI: 10.1109/JSYST.2013.2281262
Abstract
The widespread proliferation of handheld devices enables mobile carriers to
be connected at anytime and anywhere. Meanwhile, the mobility patterns of
mobile devices strongly depend on the users' movements, which are closely
related to their social relationships and behaviors. Consequently, today's
mobile networks are becoming increasingly human centric. This leads to the
emergence of a new field which we call socially-aware networking (SAN). One of
the major features of SAN is that social awareness becomes indispensable
information for the design of networking solutions. This emerging paradigm is
applicable to various types of networks (e.g. opportunistic networks, mobile
social networks, delay tolerant networks, ad hoc networks, etc) where the users
have social relationships and interactions. By exploiting social properties of
nodes, SAN can provide better networking support to innovative applications and
services. In addition, it facilitates the convergence of human society and
cyber physical systems. In this paper, for the first time, to the best of our
knowledge, we present a survey of this emerging field. Basic concepts of SAN
are introduced. We intend to generalize the widely-used social properties in
this regard. The state-of-the-art research on SAN is reviewed with focus on
three aspects: routing and forwarding, incentive mechanisms and data
dissemination. Some important open issues with respect to mobile social sensing
and learning, privacy, node selfishness and scalability are discussed.