Tag-assisted social-aware opportunistic device-to-device sharing for traffic offloading in mobile social networks

In recent years, the service demand for rich multimedia over mobile networks has continually been soaring at a tremendous pace. To solve the critical problem of mobile traffic explosion, substantial efforts have been made by researchers to try to offload mobile traffic from infrastructured cellular links to direct short-range communications locally among nearby users. In this article, we discuss the potential of combining users' online and offline social impacts to exploit D2D opportunistic sharing for offloading mobile traffic. We propose a tag-assisted social-aware D2D sharing framework, TASA, with corresponding optimization models, architecture design, and communication protocols. Through extensive simulations based on real data traces, we demonstrate that TASA can offload up to 78.9 percent of mobile traffic effectively.