Gathering Point-Aided Viral Marketing in Decentralized Mobile Social Networks

Abstract

Abstract-Viral marketing is a technique that spreads advertisement information through social networks. Recently, viral marketing through online social networks has achieved huge commercial success. However, there are still very little research reported on viral marketing in decentralized mobile social networks (MSNs). Comparing with online viral marketing, viral marketing in decentralized MSNs faces many challenges, such as unreliable information diffusion and limited network knowledge.To address these problems, we propose the gathering point-aided mobile viral marketing (GP-MVM) scheme, which contains two major components, i.e., seed selection and information diffusion. Seed selection is responsible to select a set of seed nodes from which information diffusion begins. Based on a new metric called integrated contact strength (ICS), we propose two distributed seed selection schemes, i.e., ratio seeding and threshold seeding, while, for information diffusion, we propose the GP-aided diffusion algorithm, which utilizes user GPs to promote information propagation. Continuous-time Markov chain-based analytical model shows that GP-MVM has a good scalability. Simulations indicate that GP-MVM outperforms two state-of-the-art information diffusion methods designed for MSNs, in terms of both diffusion proportion and diffusion speed.Index Terms-Gathering point (GP), information diffusion, integrated contact strength (ICS), mobile social networks (MSNs), viral marketing.

Energy harvesting and computing enabled data broadcasting in mobile social networks

“…Most of them are based on the store‐carry‐forward mechanism, where mobile users can carry and forward data for each other cooperatively. Consequently, on the basis of the user clustering at the popular locations, the mobility of mobile users is extensively exploited to improve the performance of data broadcasting in certain algorithms, such as Community‐aware Opportunistic Routing (CAOR), Homing spreading, and the scheme in Fan et al In those approaches, the data broadcasting relies on the inherent movement of users, ie, the mobility of mobile users cannot be controlled in favor of data broadcasting. While in other approaches, one or more special mobile users are intentionally deployed in the networks .…”

“…How to compute the optimal relays for data broadcasting in social cyberspace: Because of the regularity of people's daily life, mobile users usually cluster in the common places called hot spots, which are comprehensively exploited to improve the performance of data broadcasting . In MSNs, mobile users behave different capacity of broadcasting determined by their mobilities.…”

Evaluating Seed Selection for Information Diffusion in Mobile Social Networks

“…MSN is a fertile ground for information spreading. The process of information diffusion in MSN has been widely used especially for viral marketing [7]. In general, the process of information diffusion is comprised of two major parts [4]: seed selection which represents the focus of this study and information diffusion between nodes which defines the opportunistic exchange between nodes.…”

“…Most of existing information diffusion approaches [3], [6][7][8] target to optimize the number of seeds and/or to select the seeds allowing to rapidly reach a maximum number of users. Basically these approaches exploit criteria such as social relations between nodes, contacts history and node mobility to select the seed-nodes.…”

On Modeling Malware Propagation in Interest-Based Overlapping Communities

“…Online social network has become an important part of our daily lives [2]- [5], where the malware propagation can be especially accelerated by frequent interactions of the participants. Much attention has been poured into this area to predict the malware propagation pattern, based on which appropriate means can be developed to prevent such propagation.…”