Context-Aware Information Diffusion for Alerting Messages in 5G Mobile Social Networks

In emerging fifth generation (5G) systems, mobile social networks are expected to play an important role to enable proximity-based content distribution among devices. In this paper, we address social-awareness aspects and device-to-device (D2D) communications for information diffusion solutions in emergency scenarios. Context-aware information is collected from a set of devices deployed in the environment and received data are integrated and elaborated at the cellular base station before being delivered. In such a framework, we model the expected information diffusion time by taking into account both networking- and sociality-related metrics. In particular, we introduce the so-called social intercontact time which is able to model the interaction frequency between the user and a generic social platform. The proposed approach is compared with alternative solutions where the dissemination process is either managed through direct links from the central base station, as a conventional multicast scheme, or with the support from proximity communications, as a D2D-enhanced multicast scheme. The results of a performance assessment study show that the proposed framework achieves considerable gains, up to 50%, in terms of overall information diffusion time and data rate per user equipment.