K‐MING: A mobile proxy handoff control scheme for proximate group‐based geodata sharing

Abstract

This work adopts a mobile social network in proximity (MSNP)-centric group touring service concept to share geo-points of interest's (POIs') data among mobile users belonging to the same touring group. In a group-based touring service, a mobile user can create a group in the MSNP that can consist of some clusters in which some members having the 3G/3.5G/4G cellular network service are selected as cluster leaders to enable their Wi-Fi hot spot functions as mobile proxies. After that, each group member can join one of the clusters by connecting with a cluster leader's Wi-Fi hot spot. Thereafter, each cluster leader downloads geo-POIs' data using 3G/3.5G/4G cellular network and then shares the downloaded POIs' data with its cluster members through its Wi-Fi hot spot. This work proposed a handoff mechanism such that each mobile user can handoff from its currently connected cluster to the other one that belongs to the same MNSP group. The main handoff concern is that each handheld device only allows a limited number of handheld devices to connect with its Wi-Fi hot spot at the same time. This work proposed a K-member-limited MSNP-based INter Group handoff scheme called K-MING to tackle the handoff problem. The performance analysis shows that K-MING for the group touring scenario has better performance for the sharing of geo-POIs' data downloading in terms of average power consumption and average downloaded data volume from 3G/3.5G/4G cellular network than that of the individual touring scenario. KEYWORDSclustering mechanism, data sharing, group-based touring service, location-based service, mobile social networks in proximity 600 /journal/spe Softw Pract Exper. 2018;48:600-620. HUANG AND MAI 601POI. 1,2 Two types of the LBS touring service are (1) individual-based and (2) group-based. The individual-based touring system considers issues that may exist when 1 person is using the LBS system for helping his touring. 3 The group-based touring system considers issues that may exist when a number of persons are using the LBS system to tour together. [4][5][6] Mobile social networks (MSNs), which are similar to online social networks, have raised enormous research studies. 7,8 Mobile social network integrates social networks and wireless communications in the mobile environments. It can be considered as an application or system that creates virtual communities and provides various contents among mobile users, for which mobile users can join any community that was created by other mobile users using any mobile device. Proximity service is a new service that allows neighboring mobile devices to use device-to-device (D2D) or terminal-to-terminal communication to share data with each other. 9,10 Some MSNs consider proximity, ie, nearby mobile users are interacting with each other directly using the D2D/terminal-to-terminal communication technique, which is called MSN in proximity (MSNP). 11,12 A mobile user can utilize either his handheld device's Bluetooth or Wi-Fi interface to detect proximate mobile users' handheld devices an...

Proximate sharing of geo data using the credit‐considered mobile edge computing server switching control scheme

“…In our lab's previous work depicted in References 11, 12, it is found that it can achieve both (1) the reduction of (i) the downloaded data volume and the networking traffic in 4G/5G cellular network and (ii) the expense of using 4G/5G cellular network and (2) the reduction of power consumption at the same time in the 1‐level tree's sharing of downloaded POIs' contents using the multicasting transmission way for the image content, in which an adaptive Forward Error Correction technique was adopted to tackle the unreliable transmission issue in multicast. However, the group size, that is, the number of group members, of the 1‐level tree's proximate sharing is limited by the upper bound of the connected devices in the enabled Wi‐Fi AP of a handheld device.…”

“…In order to increase the service time of the group LBS scenario, the authors designed a method of having each group member's handheld device alternatively being the downloading handheld device to balance the power consumption among handheld devices. In Reference 12, in order to increase the size of the group, that is, increase the number of group members, the aforementioned scenario was extended to split group members' handheld devices into several clusters. Using the method proposed in Reference 12, each cluster head enables its Wi‐Fi AP's function to let its cluster members' handheld devices to connect, and then is in charge of downloading POIs' contents from the remote cloud server through the charged cellular network and forwarding the downloaded POIs' contents to its cluster members' handheld devices through the free Wi‐Fi network.…”

“…In Reference 12, in order to increase the size of the group, that is, increase the number of group members, the aforementioned scenario was extended to split group members' handheld devices into several clusters. Using the method proposed in Reference 12, each cluster head enables its Wi‐Fi AP's function to let its cluster members' handheld devices to connect, and then is in charge of downloading POIs' contents from the remote cloud server through the charged cellular network and forwarding the downloaded POIs' contents to its cluster members' handheld devices through the free Wi‐Fi network. Since a user of the group can move around from one cluster to the other cluster, an handoff control scheme from one cluster to the other cluster was designed in Reference 12.…”

“…Using the method proposed in Reference 12, each cluster head enables its Wi‐Fi AP's function to let its cluster members' handheld devices to connect, and then is in charge of downloading POIs' contents from the remote cloud server through the charged cellular network and forwarding the downloaded POIs' contents to its cluster members' handheld devices through the free Wi‐Fi network. Since a user of the group can move around from one cluster to the other cluster, an handoff control scheme from one cluster to the other cluster was designed in Reference 12. The work in References 11,12 only considered the 1‐hop situation, that is, members the MSN‐P are scattered in the 1‐hop range of the handheld device that is in charge of the downloading from the cellular network and the switching of the downloading handheld device is mainly based on the remaining power of handheld devices.…”

“…Since a user of the group can move around from one cluster to the other cluster, an handoff control scheme from one cluster to the other cluster was designed in Reference 12. The work in References 11,12 only considered the 1‐hop situation, that is, members the MSN‐P are scattered in the 1‐hop range of the handheld device that is in charge of the downloading from the cellular network and the switching of the downloading handheld device is mainly based on the remaining power of handheld devices. In contrast, the work presented in this paper differs from the work depicted in References 11, 12 on the following two points: (i) the k ‐hop situation, that is, members of the MSN‐P are scattered in the k ‐hop range of the handheld device that is in charge of the downloading from the cellular network, that can expand the scope of sharing to more members and (ii) the switching of the downloading handheld device is based on the remaining power and the credits of handheld devices to reach the fairness concern.…”