The impact of social distance on utility based resource allocation in next generation networks

Social networks have rapidly grown over the last years. The socio-technical information that they include may be exploited to improve the performance of the underlying communication network. This is of utmost importance especially in Next Generation Networks (NGNs), which provide multiple services with increased bandwidth requirements. In this paper, the problem of resource allocation in a bottleneck link of a NGN is examined. To this end, a utility based technique is proposed, which integrates the information of an overlaid social network expressed by the social distance parameter. In this case, the utility function employed is reformed, so as to incorporate this parameter, which in this study is determined by the users´ average popularity. Network users are classified into friendship classes according to the social distance parameter. Then, the users´ resource allocation objective is formulated as an optimization problem with inequality constraints. Due to the increased problem´s complexity, a numerical method is employed to estimate the optimal resource allocation. Numerical results are presented, which indicate the impact of the social distance parameter on resource allocation.