Social Distance Aware Resource Allocation in Wireless Networks

Social connectivity networks and the associated socio-technical context are an important determinant of a user´s resource requirements. Despite the recent attention on wireless network design, little quantitative work has been done in order to combine purely technical design methods with explicit dependencies on the social or business connectivity and utility concerns. In this paper, we quantify the effect of the socio-technical context through the notion of effective distance, and then use this distance as a parameter in the user utility function. We explore the premise that efficient and targeted resource allocation can be achieved better if the network is aware of the effective distance and the expected quality at the receiver. We demonstrate this for the case of a 802.11e compliant WLAN, where users in the socio-technical context choose to communicate through VoIP. We determine a utility function for VoIP calls in the presence of background HTTP traffic in the WLAN. We then form an objective function which will achieve better resource optimization, with knowledge regarding the effective distance and expected quality requirements. Our results show that a network which is aware of the social context can almost double the utility of the network to the users in case of VoIP traffic.