Exploiting Social Relationship to Enable Efficient Replica Allocation in Ad-hoc Social Networks

Replication is an important mechanism in modern wireless networks and has attracted significant efforts to improve its performance with different metrics including read cost, consistency and relocation cost. Traditionally, different ideal approaches are widely used to facilitate data availability. However, the quality of wireless links would be affected by many factors like mobility and overhead. The accessibility and reliability of Ad-hoc Social Network (ASNET) services can be assured by replication approaches. It is used to increase data availability by replicating data items locally or nearby. In ASNETs, replication helps to avoid data losses in case of an unpredictable group mobility that causes community partition and also aids in reducing the number of hops when a data is transmitted from source to destination. A new data replication method called ComPAS (community-partition aware replica allocation method) is proposed in this paper. This method can significantly improve ASNETs performance by exploiting social relationship while replicating in the community to achieve better efficiency and consistency while keeping the replica relocation cost as low as possible. This type of replica allocation method will increase the availability of different data items in a partitioned social community. Evaluation results verify the effectiveness of the method.