Social-aware cooperative caching mechanism in mobile social networks

To provide efficient content sharing service in a mobile social networks (MSNs), the social-aware cooperative caching mechanism is proposed. The mechanism considers the social tie strength, trustworthiness, and encountering probability among users to quantify the ability of a user, in terms of providing content sharing service to others. By analyzing the caching behaviors of users, a community-based content caching model is established to accurately estimate the popularity of contents. Based on user's ability of providing content sharing service and content popularity, the cooperative caching scheme is designed to provide differentiated content sharing services for various contents. The proposed solution synthetically considers social relations among users, content popularity, and user's mobility so that it provides a better performance for content sharing in MSNs. This is also confirmed in the simulations which show that the proposed cooperative caching mechanism not only effectively improves the success ratio of content sharing, but also greatly improves the user cache utilization efficiency.