Abstract: To cope with the explosive data demands, offloading cellular traffic through mobile social networks (MSNs) has become a promising approach to alleviate traffic load. Indeed, the repeated data transmission results in a great deal of unnecessary traffic. Existing solutions generally adopt proactive caching and achieve traffic shifting by exploiting opportunistic contacts. The key challenge to maximize the offloading utility needs leveraging the trade-off between the offloaded traffic and the users’ delay requirement. Since current caching scheme rarely address this challenge, in this paper, we first quantitatively interpret the offloading revenues on the cellular operator side associated with the scale of caching users, then develop a centralized caching protocol to maximize the offloading revenues, which includes the selective algorithm of caching location based on set-cover, the cached-data dissemination strategy based on multi-path routing and the cache replacement policy based on data popularity. The experimental results on real-world mobility traces show that the proposed caching protocol outperforms existing schemes in offloading scenario.

Key words: traffic offloading, set cover, caching, mobile social networks