Distributed Content Backup and Sharing Using Social Information

This paper addresses the need for content sharing and backup in household equipped with a home gateway that stores, tags and manages the data collected by the home users. Our solution leverages the interaction between remote gateways in a social way, i.e., by exploiting the users’ social networking information, so that backup recipients are those gateways whose users are most likely to be interested in accessing the shared content. We formulate this problem as a Budgeted Maximum Coverage (BMC) problem and we numerically compute the optimal content backup solution. We then propose a low-complexity, distributed heuristic algorithm and use simulation in a synthetic social network scenario to show that the final content placement among “friendly” gateways well approximates the optimal solution under different network settings.