TY - JOUR T1 - Mobile Data Offloading through Opportunistic Communications and Social Participation JF - Mobile Computing, IEEE Transactions on Y1 - 2012 A1 - Han,Bo A1 - Hui,Pan A1 - Kumar,V. S.A A1 - Marathe,M. V A1 - Shao,Jianhua A1 - Srinivasan, Aravind KW - 3G mobile communication KW - 3G networks KW - Bluetooth interface KW - cellular networks KW - cellular radio KW - content transfer KW - device/service discovery KW - graph theory KW - greedy algorithm KW - heuristic algorithm KW - information delivery KW - information dissemination KW - mobile data offloading KW - mobile data traffic KW - mobile phones KW - mobile social networks KW - MoSoNets KW - Nokia N900 smartphones KW - Opp-off KW - opportunistic communications KW - random algorithm KW - real-world mobility traces KW - smart phones KW - social networking (online) KW - social participation KW - target-set selection problem KW - telecommunication network routing KW - Telecommunication traffic KW - trace-driven simulation study AB - 3G networks are currently overloaded, due to the increasing popularity of various applications for smartphones. Offloading mobile data traffic through opportunistic communications is a promising solution to partially solve this problem, because there is almost no monetary cost for it. We propose to exploit opportunistic communications to facilitate information dissemination in the emerging Mobile Social Networks (MoSoNets) and thus reduce the amount of mobile data traffic. As a case study, we investigate the target-set selection problem for information delivery. In particular, we study how to select the target set with only k users, such that we can minimize the mobile data traffic over cellular networks. We propose three algorithms, called Greedy, Heuristic, and Random, for this problem and evaluate their performance through an extensive trace-driven simulation study. Our simulation results verify the efficiency of these algorithms for both synthetic and real-world mobility traces. For example, the Heuristic algorithm can offload mobile data traffic by up to 73.66 percent for a real-world mobility trace. Moreover, to investigate the feasibility of opportunistic communications for mobile phones, we implement a proof-of-concept prototype, called Opp-off, on Nokia N900 smartphones, which utilizes their Bluetooth interface for device/service discovery and content transfer. VL - 11 SN - 1536-1233 CP - 5 M3 - 10.1109/TMC.2011.101 ER -