Group Enabled Spatial Dissemination in Mobile Social Networks

Spatial dissemination allows a mobile user to send information to other mobile users who are or will appear at a user-defined region. It is typically done either via a centralized server or in a P2P fashion. In this paper, we design a new distributed spatial dissemination approach exploiting user groups in mobile social networks. Since users who are roughly in the same geographical location may obtain the same geographic relevant information or receive the same messages that have been disseminated, user groups can be utilized to reduce both the transmission cost and storage cost during the dissemination process. We have developed a technique to keep track of user group dynamics and designed methods to use group information in message replication, forwarding, and purging of the dissemination process. Our evaluation results show that the group enabled approach has very low transmission and storage costs.