3160 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PARALLEL AND DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS, VOL. 26, NO.

11, NOVEMBER 2015

Source Selection and Content Dissemination

for Preference-Aware Traffic Offloading
Hsueh-Hung Cheng and Kate Ching-Ju Lin, Member, IEEE

AbstractAs mobile devices become more ubiquitous, the amount of cellular traffic for multimedia content grows explosively.
Therefore, data dissemination through proximity-based opportunistic communications attracts the attention of service providers who
are eager for solutions of traffic offloading. In this paper, we propose PrefCast, a preference-aware opportunistic content dissemination
protocol that uses as few cellular bandwidth as possible to maximally satisfy user preferences for content objects. The efficiency of
PrefCast depends on 1) how does the base-station select initial sources, and 2) how does each user forward objects within a limited
contact duration. Since mobile users typically form communities and have heterogeneous preferences, PrefCasts base-station selects
sources that efficiently produce the maximal utility to their communities. We then derive a model to predict how much utility a forwarder
can contribute to future contacts. PrefCasts users can hence use such prediction to find their optimal forwarding schedule, which
maximizes the utility contribution, in a distributed way. Our trace-based evaluation shows that, without explicit source selection,
PrefCast produces a 15.7 and 22.6 percent higher average utility than the protocols that only consider contact frequency or preference
of local contacts, respectively. Enabling source selection in PrefCast further improves the utility by 49.3 percent.

Index TermsOpportunistic dissemination, source selection, traffic offloading, user preference

1 INTRODUCTION

W ITH the growing popularity of personalization appli-

cations, clients prefer to access multimedia content
based on their personal interests via mobile devices. Previ-
ous study [1] has reported that mobile data traffic of AT&T
has increased 5,000 percent in the past few years. Among
these traffic demands, a major portion of traffic is contrib-
uted by content dissemination. One way to eliminate the
bandwidth requirement for this application-layer content
distribution service is to exploit cellular multicast protocols,
e.g., MBMS or eMBMS. The efficiency of MBMS/eMBMS
however could decrease when users join the system in dif-
ferent time and require the base-station to broadcast several
times whenever every new user joins. To eliminate this bur-
den, many prior works [2], [3], [4] have shown the benefit of
leveraging mobile social networks (MSNs) to help offload
cellular traffic via opportunistic communications for content
dissemination applications.
Opportunistic communication [5], [6] is a technique that
allows users without permanent connection to communi-
cate using low-cost proximity-based connection, such as
Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, when they encounter opportunistically
[7]. Thus, instead of unicasting the content object to every
subscriber via cellular connection, the cellular base-station
can deliver content objects to part of subscribers, called
initial sources, and have the initial sources propagate
the objects to all the subscribers through opportunistic

The authors are with the Research Center for Information Technology
Innovation, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan.
E-mail: {xuehung, katelin}@citi.sinica.edu.tw.
Manuscript received 24 Mar. 2014; revised 7 Oct. 2014; accepted 9 Oct. 2014.
Date of publication 16 Oct. 2014; date of current version 7 Oct. 2015.
Recommended for acceptance by Y. Wang.
For information on obtaining reprints of this article, please send e-mail to:
reprints@ieee.org, and reference the Digital Object Identifier below.
Digital Object Identifier no. 10.1109/TPDS.2014.2363652
1045-9219 2014 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
forwarding in a mobile social network. Efficiency of such
opportunistic traffic offloading is mainly determined by
two key factors: 1) selection of initial sources, and 2) oppor-
tunistic forwarding strategy. Most of previous studies [1],
[2], [3], [4] address the above two challenges only according
to contact frequency between mobile users, but are lack
of considering heterogeneous user preferences for various
content objects. Therefore, this paper targets at developing a
preference-aware opportunistic content dissemination sys-
tem that addresses the above two design issues with consid-
eration of user preferences.
Efficient offloading relies on a suitable set of initial sources
that can quickly distribute content objects over an MSN. An
intuitive idea is to select the users with a high probability of
encountering other users as initial sources. This simple solu-
tion however neglects the structure of a social network. Spe-
cifically, if the base-station delivers the same object to
sources belonging to the same community, users in different
communities could hardly obtain the object through oppor-
tunistic communications. A more desirable solution is to
deliver objects to as few sources as possible, while ensuring
that the selected sources belong to different communities
and can help distribute content over the entire mobile social
network. In addition, different communities might be inter-
ested in different types of content, source selection should
also consider heterogeneous interests of communities. The
first goal of this work is hence to propose a community-
based source selection scheme that takes both the commu-
nity structure of an MSN and user preferences into account.
Once the objects are delivered to initial sources, users can
exploit opportunistic communications to carry-and-forward
the objects. In an MSN, due to user mobility and varying
network conditions, connection between users usually exists
only for a short period of time. To improve forwarding effi-
ciency within a limited contact duration, each user should
CHENG AND LIN: SOURCE SELECTION AND CONTENT DISSEMINATION FOR PREFERENCE-AWARE TRAFFIC OFFLOADING
carefully schedule when to deliver which content objects.
Intuitively, a user can forward objects merely according to
the preferences of its local contacts. This strategy is however
sub-optimal because any local contact can further distribute
those received objects to its future contacts until the objects
expire. Therefore, a forwarder should consider not only the
preferences of its local contacts, but also the overall utility
gained by future contacts. Our second goal is hence to
design a forwarding strategy that maximizes the utility of
all users, including both local contacts and future contacts.
In this paper, we propose PrefCast, a preference-aware
content dissemination protocol that offloads increasing cel-
lular traffic via opportunistic communications, while
achieving the maximal global utility of all mobile users. The
rationale of PrefCasts design is to use as few cellular band-
width resources as possible, but efficiently exploit limited
contact opportunities to maximally satisfy users preferen-
ces. To this end, PrefCast considers both the community
structure of an MSN and heterogeneous user preferences to
address two issues: initial source selection and forwarding
scheduling. Our contributions are as follows.

PrefCast enables community-based source selection
that considers the importance of selected sources in
the communities of an MSN. It hence achieves the
trade-off between maximizing user preferences and
offloading cellular traffic.

PrefCast allows each user in an MSN to predict the
total future utility it can contribute by forwarding an
object in a given time period. Given such prediction,
each user then finds its optimal forwarding schedule
that generates the maximal global utility in a distrib-
uted manner.

We use trace-based simulations to evaluate the per-
formance of PrefCast. The results show that, without
explicit source selection, the proposed forwarding
scheduling scheme produces a 15.7 and 22.6 percent
higher average utility than the protocols that only
consider contact frequency or preferences of local
contacts, respectively. Enabling the proposed com-
munity-based source selection in PrefCast further
improves the utility by 49.3 percent.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows.
Section 2 summarizes existing works on cellular traffic off-
loading and content dissemination through opportunistic
communications. Section 3 gives an overview of PrefCast.
Sections 4 and 5 describe the details of the proposed source
selection algorithm and forwarding scheduling scheme,
respectively. In Section 6, we evaluate the performance of
PrefCast using real trace data. Finally, Section 7 concludes
this work.
2 RELATED WORK
In this section, we review the related work in three catego-
ries: cellular traffic offloading, opportunistic communica-
tions, and interest-based content distribution.
2.1 Traffic Offloading
The concept of offloading cellular traffic through opportu-
nistic communications is proposed in [1], [2], which study
3161
how to select a fixed number of initial sources. It however
does not discuss how to efficiently distribute objects in an
opportunistic network. Baier et al. [3] utilize movement
prediction of mobile users to improve the performance of
opportunistic traffic offloading. Lu et al. [8] then propose
an approximation algorithm to identify a small number of
individuals to diffuse the information to the entire net-
work as soon as possible. Our prior work [4] investigates
a source selection scheme that further takes social com-
munities and forwarding probability in an opportunistic
network into account. In addition to the above offloading
protocols, community detection algorithms, e.g., [9], [10],
can also be modified to select sources for traffic offload-
ing. For example, an intuitive modification is to select a
few sources from each community to ensure full cover-
age. The above works consider a scenario where the cellu-
lar network wants to opportunistically disseminate a
single content object to as many subscribers as possible,
without considering users heterogeneous interests in dif-
ferent content objects. This work however focuses on off-
loading traffic load by disseminating content to users of
interest through opportunistic communications. On the
other hand, all the above works, including our previous
work, do not take user incentive into account, which how-
ever is also one of the design challenges in mobile social
networks. While our work takes the first step to consider
user preference in joint source selection and content dis-
semination, incorporating recent incentive strategies, e.g.,
[11], [12], [13], into our design is undoubtedly the next
step to improve efficiency and practicality of our protocol.
2.2 Opportunistic Communications
Opportunistic communication is a routing scheme typically
used in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) [14]. Prior works
on opportunistic communications can be classified into
three classes: unicast, multicast, and content dissemination.
Several unicast routing schemes have been proposed to
improve the end-to-end delivery ratio or transmission
delay in a DTN. For example, Epidemic routing [15] floods
messages to every contact until the messages reach the des-
tination. To reduce the overhead of epidemic routing,
some later works investigate the trade-off between the
number of relays and the delivery probability. In
PROPHET [16], each user predicts the contact probability
of each node pair, and forwards messages to the node that
has the highest contact probability with the destination.
Spray and wait routing [17] operates similar to Epidemic
routing, but restricts the number of forwardings for each
object in order to reduce the forwarding overhead.
Recently, social-based forwarding schemes [18], [19] con-
sider various social network properties including central-
ity and communities, and forward data to the nodes
playing the vital roles in a social network.
Unicast routing protocols have been extended to support
multicast in [20], [21], [22]. The approach proposed in [20]
attempts to maximize the message delivery ratio for multi-
cast members that join or leave the network dynamically. In
[21], [22], given a set of destinations, the authors extend the
two-hop relay algorithms used in unicast to support multi-
cast destinations.
3162 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PARALLEL AND DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS,
Different from the above unicast and multicast protocols
that have a set of specific destinations, content dissemina-
tion [23], [24], [25], [26], [27], [28] targets on distributing
objects to multiple destinations. The dissemination protocol
proposed in [23] ensures that content delivered to the users
is as fresh as possible subject to the limited downlink
capacity of the service provider. Another work [24] adapts
the forwarding strategy to the temporal utility of subscrip-
tions and events such that information can be delivered to
users in time. The work [27] then exploits the concept of
geocommunity to improve data broadcasting efficiency.
Time-varying channel conditions and user mobility are then
jointly considered in [28]. All the above works focus on
improving content delivery efficiency without considering
user interest.
2.3 Interest-Based Content Distribution
Interest-based content distribution has been considered as
an important issue in several networks, such as peer-to-peer
networks [29], [30] and cellular networks [31]. Recently,
some works further study interest-based content distribu-
tion in delay tolerant networks [32], [33], [34], [35]. The
work [32] investigates how to place data objects in regions
where users of interest locate. It however is not designed
from the perspective of cellular traffic offloading, and also
only leverages random forwarding. Ning et al. [33] consider
a network where users are selfish, and propose a credit-
based incentive scheme to encourage users to share the
objects of interest. A publish/subscribe scheme is proposed
in [34] to allow DTN users to advertise or collect content
they are interested in. The user-centric scheme [35] attempts
to select the minimum number of relays to forward an object
to a set of known clients that are interested in that object.
Our work however focuses on a best effort scenario, where
content sources do not explicitly know who will be the
interesters, but simply disseminate the objects so that the
utility gained by all clients can be maximized. These two
types of dissemination designs are both important and nec-
essary for diverse upper-layer applications. Our previous
work [36] investigates preference-aware content dissemina-
tion, which takes heterogeneous user preferences into
account and enables each forwarder to determine its opti-
mal object forwarding schedule that can produce the maxi-
mal total utility for all users. Different from our preliminary
study that randomly selects a set of initial sources to dis-
seminate content objects, this work argues that initial sour-
ces have a great impact on dissemination efficiency, and
jointly solves initial source selection and preference-aware
content dissemination.
3 PREFCAST OVERVIEW AND ASSUMPTIONS
We consider an environment where a base-station intends
to distribute a set of multimedia content objects M to a set
of users V before the deadline. All the users in V form a
mobile social network G V; E, where E is the set of edges users via opportunistic communications. An MSN user
between any two users if they have contact with each other.
Each edge i; j 2 E is associated with the contact frequency
fij between users i and j. Each object m 2 M has a deadline
Tm . Suppose each user i 2 V has a different preference ui;m
for each object m 2 M. The utility ui;m here is the value of a
VOL. 26, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2015
pre-defined utility function. In particular, an object m is
usually associated with several attributes am;1 ; am;2 ;    ; am;k ,
e.g., singer, genre, language for a music object. Each client
might have different preference ui;m;a for different attributes
a. An example utility function g is to estimate the final util-
ity value by calculating the weighted average of the
preference
P for different attributes, i.e., ui;m gui;m;a
a a i;m;a where the weight g a can be selected by the
g
u ,
application developers based on the importance of attribute
a. Our design only requires the information about the final
utility value ui;m , but lets the application developers or sys-
tem operators define their own utility function g, which
can be a linear or non-linear function. User i can gain the
utility ui;m if it retrieves object m before m expires, i.e., Tm .
Our goal is to exploit limited cellular bandwidth resources
to provide users as high utility as possible.
3.1 PrefCasts Components
To offload cellular traffic, PrefCast lets the base-station
deliver the objects to part of mobile users, which are desig-
nated as initial sources. Those initial sources then help dis-
seminate the objects to other users in the MSN using
opportunistic forwarding. To realize this goal, PrefCast has
the following two components: 1) source-object assignment,
which is performed by the base-station, and 2) preference-
aware forwarding, which is determined by each MSN user in
a distributed way. We define the two problems as follows,
and describe the detailed design of two components in Sec-
tions 4 and 5, respectively.
Source-object assignment. We consider a scenario where
the base-station has multiple objects to distribute. To ensure
load balancing, the base-station should select multiple sour-
ces to distribute different objects. The tuple of a source-
object assignment s; m indicates that the base-station
selects user s 2 V as an initial source of object m 2 M. Since
different content objects typically have different popularity,
We allow a popular object to be assigned to multiple initial
sources, which can cooperatively disseminate that popular
object to more users. The more initial sources the base-sta-
tion selects to distribute the objects, the more mobile users
can obtain the objects opportunistically and gain utility.
However, delivering the objects to too many sources also
degrades the benefit of cellular traffic offloading. Hence, to
balance the trade-off between utility performance and off-
loading efficiency, the base-station must determine an effi-
cient assignment, i.e., selecting a suitable set of tuples A
from all possible tuples fs; m : 8s 2 V; 8m 2 Mg. The
objective of source-object assignment is to maximize the
total preference utility for all mobile users, while keeping
the number of deliveries through cellular connection, i.e.,
the size of A, as small as possible.
Maximum-utility forwarding scheduling. Once the selected
sources download the assigned objects via cellular connec-
tion, they can disseminate those objects to other mobile
becomes a forwarder if it obtains an object from the base-
station or any other forwarder. Each forwarder can use
proximity-based communication techniques, such as Wi-Fi
or Bluetooth, to distribute the objects to its contacts within
its transmission range. Each forwarder might have multiple
CHENG AND LIN: SOURCE SELECTION AND CONTENT DISSEMINATION FOR PREFERENCE-AWARE TRAFFIC OFFLOADING
objects, but can only broadcast a single object at a time. The
problem becomes even more challenging because different
contacts of a forwarder might have different contact dura-
tions and would overhear different subsets of the forwarded
objects. As a result, different forwarding schedules, i.e., the
forwarding sequence of the forwarders objects, could result
in various achievable utilities. To maximize the utility that
all MSN users can get, each forwarder should carefully
determine its forwarding schedule, which specifies which
object should be forwarded in each time-slot. We refer to
this problem as the forwarding scheduling problem. To solve
this problem in a distributed way, we let each forwarder
use its local information to predict the utility that can be
contributed to all the other users in the future by forward-
ing an object in a particular time. We then design a prefer-
ence-aware forwarding scheduling algorithm that allows each
forwarder to find its optimal forwarding schedule based on
the prediction.
3.2 Assumptions
We assume that each user i can estimate the contact fre-
quency with user j based on the encounter history [37] by
fij Nij =T , where Nij is the number of past contacts within a
duration T . Without loss of generality, fii is set to 1 for all
i 2 V. The accuracy of fij can be improved by computing the
moving average over time. A newly-joined user might not
obtain accurate enough estimation of contact frequency. We
however assume that new users will join the network sequen-
tially, instead of in a burst. The impact of such a new user
problem is hence negligible. We will describe our protocol in
Section 4.1 by assuming that each client knows the contact
frequency with other clients. However, in practice, a client
might not have enough memory space or computational
power to track the contact frequency of all nearby contacts.
We will explain in Section 4.3 that, in practice, our protocol
only requires each client to measure the contact frequency of
a few most-frequent contacts. Each user i hence only periodi-
cally updates the measured contact frequency fij of the most
frequency contacts and its preference ui;m to the base station.
Some previous studies [22], [23] have observed from sev-
eral real traces that the inter-contact duration between
users is exponentially distributed. We hence further assume
that the contact process of each node pair follows a homoge-
neous Poisson process. Though some other works [38], [39]
model the inter-contact duration as a power law distribu-
tion, we leave generalizing our design to the power law of
inter-contact times as our future work. Finally, this work
mainly focuses on improving dissemination efficiency,
and assumes that users that join this system are willing to
cooperatively forward content. Considering incentive is
another challenging issue, and could be a potential future
research direction.
4 COMMUNITY-BASED SOURCE-OBJECT
ASSIGNMENT
In an MSN, users usually form multiple communities [19],
and those communities could be disjointed or partially over-
lapped. Hence, solely considering the contact frequency is
not sufficient for content dissemination applications, because
the objects might be distributed to the users that have a high
3163
TABLE 1
Notations Used in Source-Object Assignment
Notations Definition
V the set of users in an MSN
E the set of edges between any two users if they
have contact with each other
M the set of content objects
Gm V m ; E m the duplicate MSN graph for object m,
where V m V and E m E
Tm the deadline of object m
ui;m the preference (utility) of user i for object m
A the set of source-object assignments
fij ; fijP the one-hop and multi-hop contact frequency
between users i and j, respectively
1 the community including the users that have
Ci;m ; Ci;m
multi-hop and one-hop contact, respectively,
with user i by deadline Tm
Ut the cumulative utility until the t-th iteration of
source-object assignment
Du the threshold used to determine the number of
assignments
contact frequency but belong to the same community.
Namely, it is very likely that the objects can only be spread
through the single community, but cannot be distributed
across different communities. In addition, we also need to
assign an object to an initial source with consideration of
user preferences. Without considering preferences, we might
assign a source with a high contact frequency to deliver an
object to many of its contacts who are not interested in that
object. Thus, we propose a community-based algorithm to
determine the most effective set of source-object assign-
ments, i.e., tuples s; m. The basic idea behind our design is
to select top k source-object assignments that can generate
the highest utility for users belonging to the communities of
those sources. We then find a suitable number of k to achieve
the best trade-off between preference utility and cellular
bandwidth requirement. The notations used in our commu-
nity-based algorithm are summarized in Table 1.
4.1 Selecting a Fixed Number of Assignments
We first describe how our community-based scheme selects
a fixed number k of source-object assignments. We will
describe how to adaptively determine the value of k in
Section 4.2. In our design, an object could be assigned to
multiple sources if it is popular; on the other hand, a user
could be designated as the source of multiple objects. To
evaluate how good is a source-object assignment i; m, we
predict how much utility will a source candidate i contrib-
ute to the mobile social network before object m expires. In
an MSN, any other user j can get the utility uj;m if it
retrieves object m from source i through opportunistic
multi-hop forwarding before object m expires. Based on this
observation, we duplicate the graph of the MSN G to
Gm V m ; E m for each object m 2 M, and define Ci;m as
the community of user i for object m, which is the subset of
users in V m that could get object m from user i through
multi-hop forwarding before m expires.
We say that user i can deliver an object to user j through
multi-hop forwarding if they have a multi-hop contact along a
path P : i ! r1 ! r2 j. That is, user i might not encounter
user j directly, but can ask its contact r1 to forward the
3164 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PARALLEL AND DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS, VOL. 26, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2015

object hop-by-hop along path P . Let fijP denote multi-hop

contact frequency, which predicts how often user i can have a
multi-hop contact with j along any path P . Since each node
pair reports their measured one-hop contact frequency, the
base-station can estimate fijP by
1
fijP max P 1
;
P 2Pij
8r;r0 2P frr0

where Pij is the set of all possible paths between i and j and
frr0 is the one-hop contact frequency between relays r and r0
over a path P . The rationale is that we assume the expecta-
tion of time to forward an object along the multi-hop path
can be estimated by the sum of the average contact interval,
1=frr0 , between each node pair along the path. Though an
object could opportunistically traverse multiple paths, we
only conservatively use the frequency of the single best
(shortest) path as the estimate.
Given such prediction, we expect that user j could get
object m from i via multi-hop forwarding before deadline
Tm if the traversing time 1=fijP along path P does not exceed
the deadline Tm , i.e., Tm  fijP  1. Note that, since each node
pair measures their contact frequency by the inverse of the
expected inter-contact time, the timescale of Tm here should
be the same with the timescale used in contact frequency
measurement.
We then define the community of user i for object m as
 
Ci;m j : Tm  fijP  1; 8j 2 V m ;
which is the set of users that have a multi-hop contact with i
at least once before deadline Tm . The community Ci;m can
be found by a breadth-first search mechanism shown in
Algorithm 1. Since all the user j in Ci;m could get the utility
uj;m before deadline Tm , the utilityP
contribution of assigning
m to source i can be estimated by j2Ci;m uj;m . The base-sta-
tion can hence use such prediction to select the best source-
object assignment s ; m that generates the maximum util-
ity contribution to its community as follows:
X 4 s ; m
s ; m arg max uj;m :
i2V m ;m2M
j2Ci;m
Algorithm 1. Search Community Ci;m of User i on Gm
input: user i; graph Gm for object m 2 M; contact frequency
fjk ; 8j; k 2 E m
P
1 fi;j fi;j ; 8j 2 V m
2 Ci;m fg
3 Q fig
4 while Q6f do
5 j dequeueQ
6 Ci;m Ci;m [ fjg
7 forall the j; k 2 E m do
8 P
fik maxfikP
; 1=f1P f1
jk
9 if fij  T  1 then ij
P users in Ca;m1 could get object m1 from source a before Tm1 ,
10 Q Q [ fkg
11 return Ci;m
The proposed community-based source selection algo-
rithm, as shown in Algorithm 2, uses the above strategy to
Fig. 1. An example shows how the proposed community-based algo-
rithm selects three source-object assignments for three objects m1; m2
and m3.
select the top k source-object assignments. In our design, an
object could be assigned to multiple sources. As a result, a
user could get multiple duplicates of an object from differ-
ent sources through opportunistic communications, but can
gain the utility of that object only once. To avoid from repet-
itively counting the utility of getting the duplicated object,
our source selection algorithm removes the users belonging
to Ci;m and the adjacent edges from Gm if user i has
been selected as the source of object m, as in line 6 of
Algorithm 2. By doing this, we can ensure not to repetitively
count the preferences of the users in Ci;m for object m in the
following iterations of source-object assignment.
Algorithm 2. Community-Based Source-Object Selection
input: set of objects M; Gm V m ; E m ; 8m 2 M; contact
frequency fij ; 8i; j 2 E; a given number of assignments
k; termination threshold Du and a pre-defined checking
interval n; set of initial source-object assignments A fg
1 total Ut 0; 8t 2 Z
2 for t 1 to k do
1
3 find community Ci;m and one-hop community Ci;m over
Gm for all i 2 V m and m 2 M P
arg maxi2V m ;m2M j2C 1 uj;m
5 A A [ fs ; m g
i;m
6 Gm V m nCs ;mP ; E m nfi; j : i 2 Cs ;m ; j 2 V m g
7 Ut Ut  1 j2Cs ;m uj;m
8 if Ut  Ut  n=Ut  n  Du then
9 break
10 return A
Fig. 1 is an example showing how the proposed algo-
rithm selects three source-object assignments for three
objects m1; m2 and m3. The MSN graph is duplicated to
Gm1 , Gm2 and Gm3 accordingly. User a is selected as the first
source of object m1 because, based on the contact frequency,
the users in its community Ca;m1 can get the highest utility
by retrieving object m1. After the first assignment, since all
we exclude those users by removing them and their adja-
cent edges from Gm1 . We then choose the tuples b; m2 and
c; m1 as the second and third assignments, respectively.
This example illustrates two design ideas. First, even
though user d could get object m1 from source c by the
CHENG AND LIN: SOURCE SELECTION AND CONTENT DISSEMINATION FOR PREFERENCE-AWARE TRAFFIC OFFLOADING
deadline Tm1 , we do not count its preference for m1 because
it might also be able to retrieve m1 from source a and we
already account for this utility gain in the first iteration.
Second, we select user c as the second source of m1, rather
than any source in Gm3 , because the utility contributed by
Cc;m1 is higher than any in both Gm2 and Gm3 , even if we
have already excluded the users who could get the dupli-
cate of m1 after the first assignment. The same procedure
can be repeated until a specific number of assignments is
selected or when the terminating condition, which will be
introduced in Section 4.2, is reached.
Ideally, we should select a source-object assignment
that can produce the maximum utility for the community
of the selected source. However, finding the community of
each user on Gm for all m 2 M requires an expensive
computational cost. To reduce the computational complex-
1 frequently is low; hence, we can neglect the expected utility
ity, we can instead use one-hop community Ci;m of each user
1
i to select source-object assignments. Specifically, Ci;m is a
subset of Ci;m and only includes the users that directly
have contact with a candidate source i before deadline Tm .
That is, Ci;m1
fj : Tm  fij  1g. The one-hop community
can be easily found without breadth-first search in Algo-
rithm 1. Therefore, to reduce the computational cost, we
can alternatively select the source-object tuple that produ-
ces the maximum utility to P its one-hop community, i.e.,
s ; m arg maxi2V m ;m2M j2C 1 uj;m , as in line 4 of
i;m
Algorithm 2. After each assignment, we can still remove
the users in the multi-hop community Cs ;m from Gm , as
shown in line 6 of Algorithm 2, because the cost of finding
the community of a single source is relatively low.
4.2 Terminating Condition
So far we have described how to select a fixed number of
source-object assignments. We next discuss how to deter-
mine a suitable number of assignments. Our goal is to bal-
ance the trade-off between preference utility and cellular
bandwidth requirement. Our design is based on an observa-
tion that the total achievable utility usually converges after
selecting a sufficient number of sources. More specifically,
the incremental utility brought by adding an additional
source-object assignment usually decreases with the num-
ber of selected assignments. Hence, our algorithm termi-
nates iterative source selection when the incremental utility
is less than a pre-defined threshold Du . To avoid undesirable
termination due to a single iteration of assignment, we com-
pute the incremental utility of every n assignments, rather
than that of a single assignment, and terminate our algo-
rithm when the following condition is satisfied.
Utcurr  Utcurr  n
 Du ;
Utcurr  n
where Ut is the cumulative utility until the tth iteration of
source selection and tcurr is the current iteration. If the above
equation holds, it implies that the number of assignments is
sufficient to achieve a high enough utility, and we do not
need to waste more cellular bandwidth to deliver the objects
to sources in the MSN. We will investigate how to choose a
proper threshold in Section 6.2.
3165
4.3 Reducing Feedback Overhead
To perform the proposed source selection algorithm, the
base-station needs to know contact relationships between
MSN users. In principle, each MSN user i should feedback
the contact frequency fij of all its contacts j to the base-sta-
tion in order for the base-station to construct graph G. How-
ever, in practice, a client might not measure the contact
frequency of all nearby contacts. In addition, updating such
contact information might require a considerable amount of
upload bandwidth. To reduce such an overhead, we allow
each user to only measure and feedback the contact fre-
quency of its most frequent contacts to the base-station. Spe-
cifically, we let each user only report the contact frequency
of d most frequent contacts, i.e., the neighbors with the d
highest contact frequency. The idea is that the probability of
content sharing between two users who do not encounter
gain of content sharing between those infrequent contacts.
The base-station can then use the feedback of partial contact
relationships to construct an incomplete graph G0 V; E 0 ,
where E 0 is a subset of E and only contains the edges with a
high contact frequency, and performs Algorithm 2 over G0 .
We will evaluate in Section 6.3 how such partial information
feedback affects the achievable utility and the amount of
upload traffic.
5 PREFERENCE-AWARE OPPORTUNISTIC
FORWARDING
We first formulate the maximum-utility forwarding model to
maximally satisfy user preferences, and propose an optimal
forwarding scheduling algorithm to solve the above model
in Section 5.1. We then derive in Section 5.2 how to predict
the future utility that each user can contribute by forward-
ing an object in a specific time-slot. The notations used in
our forwarding algorithm are summarized in Table 2.
5.1 Maximum-Utility Forwarding Scheduling
We formulate the forwarding scheduling problem as a dis-
crete-time model, where the length of each time-slot is set to
the time required to broadcast an object. Without loss of gen-
erality, we assume that each transmission starts at the begin-
ning of a time-slot and occupies the whole slot. Let Mtf
denote the set of objects cached by forwarder f 2 V in a given
time-slot t, which is a subset of all objects, i.e., Mtf  M.
Each object m 2 Mtf might be an original object downloaded
from the base-station or a copy retrieved from other forward-
ers. We then collect the users that locate within the transmis-
sion range of forwarder f in time-slot t as a group V tf . Since
mobile users might join or leave a group arbitrarily, the
members in forwarder fs group V tf could change with time,
0
i.e., V tf 6 V tf if t 6 t 0 . This implies that broadcasting the
same object m 2 Mtf in different time-slots, e.g., the current
time-slot t or any future time-slot t > t, could produce dif-
ferent utilities. Therefore, each forwarder must schedule the
transmission sequence of its objects such that the total utility
gained by all users can be maximized. In particular, for any
forwarder f, we define a binary variable xm;t to indicate
whether f decides to broadcast object m in time-slot t.
Namely, xm;t 1 if object m is broadcast in time-slot t, and
3166 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PARALLEL AND DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS,
TABLE 2
Notations Used in Forwarding Scheduling
Notations Definition
V tf the set of users that have contact with
forwarder f in time-slot t
Mtf the set of objects owned by forwarder f
in time-slot t
dfi the duration of contact between user f and i
T the set of feasible forwarding time-slots for
a forwarder
vlm;t total local utility contribution of broadcasting
object m by forwarder f in time-slot t
vgm;t total global utility contribution of broadcasting
object m by forwarder f in time-slot t
Ui; m; t the future utility contributed by user i if it gets
object m in time-slot t
xm;t ; x an indicator denoting if forwarder f sends
object m in time-slot t, and its matrix form
Vx; V the total utility contributed by a forwarder
schedule x, and the maximal total utility
V maxx Vx
Fi;m t the probability that user j has not received
object m in time-slot t from any other contacts
qj k the probability that j and k will not meet in a
time-slot t
Gb the bipartite graph used for forwarder f to
Mtf [ T ; E solve the forwarding schedule in time-slot t
M a bipartite matching in graph Gb
xm;t 0 otherwise. Our goal is to enable each forwarder to
find its optimal forwarding schedule xm;t ; 8m 2 Mtf ; t  t,
denoted by the vector form x for short, that produces the
maximal total utility for all users in the MSN.
When forwarder f meets a group of neighboring users
V tf in time-slot t, it can broadcast any object m 2 Mtf to
all its neighbors in V tf . Each user i 2 V tf who does not
own object m can then obtain the utility ui;m . The
forwarder f can therefore produce the local utility contri-
P
bution vlm;t = Mt ui;m in time-slot t. Since for-
i2V t ;m 2
f i
warder f can only broadcast a single object in time-slot t,
f can choose to forward the object with the maximal local
utility contribution, i.e., m arg maxm2Mt vlm;t , for group
f f
V tf . However, solely maximizing local utility might not be
able to produce the maximal global utility due to the lack
of consideration of the utility contributed by group mem-
bers in V tf to their future contacts. Taking such future con-
tribution into account, we let each user predict the total
utility it can contribute by storing and forwarding object
m after time t, denoted by future utility contribution
Ui; m; t. The forwarder f can then request each of its
neighbors to report the estimate of Ui; m; t, and com-
pute the following global utility contribution vgm;t that
can benefit not only local group members but also their
future contacts by broadcasting object m to V tf in time-
slot t
X object is sent first. However, the forwarding sequence of
vgm;t Ui; m; t: (1)
= Mti
i2V tf ;m 2
Given a forwarding schedule x, a forwarder can generate
the following total global utility contribution for all time-
slots t  t:
VOL. 26, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2015
TABLE 3
Example of Utility Contribution
user i time-slot t
Ui; m; t vgm;t
n1 n2 t t1
object m m1 1 5 object m m1 1 + 5 = 6 5
object m m2 3 2 object m m2 3 + 2 = 5 2
(a) future utility contribution (b) global utility
X
Vx xm;t vgm;t : (2)
m2Mtf ;tt
We note that clients can build proximity-based communica-
tions via LTE D2D, Wi-Fi Direct or Bluetooth, each of which
has specified the discovery and association protocol. We
can hence embed the global utility contribution in the asso-
ciation messages. The extra overhead required by utility
information exchange is hence negligible. Take Wi-Fi Direct
as an example. Device scanning consists of two phases: the
searching state, which sends the probe message, and the lis-
tening state, which waits for the response message, each
with 100-300 ms [40]. Say we annotate the response message
with our contribution utility, which is represented by a 4-
byte floating point and sent at the base-rate (e.g., 6 Mb/s in
802.11a). Then, the airtime required to deliver these infor-
mation is 32=6  jMm j ms, where jMm j is the number of
objects owned by neighbor m. For example, the overhead is
only increased from 200600 ms to 205605 ms if
jMm j 1000.
We leave presenting how each user predicts its future
utility contribution Ui; m; t in Section 5.2, and first address
how a forwarder f schedules the forwarding sequence of all
its objects m 2 Mtf according to the global utility contribu-
tion vgm;t for all t  t. Intuitively, for each time-slot t, for-
warder f can greedily maximize the global utility by
broadcasting the object mg with the maximal global utility
contribution, i.e., mg arg maxm2Mt vgm;t . We let x~ denote
f
the forwarding schedule selected by such a greedy solution,
and hence x~mg ;t 1. The forwarder f can then remove object
mg from the object set, i.e., Mt1 Mtf nfmg g, and repeat
the same greedy procedure in every time-slot t  t to pro-
~ V~
duce a total global utility contribution V x.
However, the greedy strategy is sometimes suboptimal
because the forwarder only considers the future utility
contribution of a single time-slot at a time. Ideally, differ-
ent users in V tf might meet the forwarder f for different
durations and, therefore, should have heterogeneous pri-
orities. Consider a scenario where f has contact with
neighbors n1 and n2 in time-slot t for one and two time-
slots, respectively. In this case, n1 has a shorter contact
duration and can only retrieve a single object from f, while
n2 can get two objects. If the forwarder wants to broadcast
two objects m1 and m2 , it does not matter for n2 which
m1 and m2 determines which one can be received by n1
and, thus, affects the total utility that can be contributed
by the two transmissions.
More specifically, assume that n1 and n2 have a future
utility contribution shown in Table 3a. Here, we assume that,
CHENG AND LIN: SOURCE SELECTION AND CONTENT DISSEMINATION FOR PREFERENCE-AWARE TRAFFIC OFFLOADING
for each user i and object m, the future utility contribution
of any two consecutive time-slots, i.e., Ui; m; t and
Ui; m; t 1, does not change much, and thus use
Ui; m; t to approximate Ui; m; t 1 in this example. The
global utility contribution vgm;t of broadcasting the objects
m 2 fm1 ; m2 g in time-slots t 2 ft; t 1g can then be com-
puted as shown in Table 3b. The greedy strategy solely con-
siders the global contribution of the first time-slot t, and, as
a result, first sends object m1 because forwarding m1 in t
produces a higher global contribution than m2 , i.e.,
vgm1 ;t 6 > vgm2 ;t 5. However, if we compute the total
utility contribution of two time-slots t and t 1, we get that
the greedy forwarding sequence m1 ! m2 produces a total
global utility vgm1 ;t vgm2 ;t1 6 2 8 lower than the
reverse sequence m2 ! m1 , which produces the total global
utility vgm2 ;t vgm1 ;t1 5 5 10.
We observe from the above example that forwarder f can
achieve the maximal total contribution V by considering
multiple successive time-slots after t if it can exactly know
or predict the contact durations dfi for all neighbors i 2 V tf .
That is, given the object set Mtf in time-slot t, f can schedule
which objects should be broadcast during the following
available time-slots t; t max to maximize the total global
utility contribution, where t max maxi2V t t dfi is the time-
f can be assigned at most a single time-slot and, in addition,
slot when group V tf is disbanded. For ease of exposition, we
define a set of available time-slots T ft; t1; t2: . . . ;
t max g. Such a maximum-utility forwarding problem for for-
warder f in time-slot t can then be formalized as follows:
X point, as the red lines shown in Fig. 2. For any m 2 Mtf and
V maxx Vx maxx xm;t vgm;t
m2Mtf ;t2T
X  X 
maxx xm;t Ui; m; t (3a)
m2Mtf ;t2T = Mti ;t<tdfi
i2V tf ;m 2
subject to
X bipartite graph Gb . Therefore, we can apply the well-known
xm;t  1; 8t 2 T
m2Mtf
X
xm;t  1; 8m 2 Mtf
t2T
xm;t 2 f0; 1g:
Eqs. (3b) and (3c), respectively, restrict that forwarder f
can at most broadcast a single object in each time-slot, and
can only forward each object at most once. Since each user i
in group V tf has a contact with f for a different duration dfi
and will leave the group in time-slot t dfi , the system can
only gain the future utility contribution Ui; m; t if user i
receives the object m before it leaves the group, i.e.,
t < t dfi . Therefore, the global utility of broadcasting object
m, i.e., vgm;t , varies with time-slot t, as shown in Eq. (3a). The
objective is hence to find the optimal forwarding schedule
xm;t for all m 2 Mtf and t 2 T , such that forwarder f can con-
tribute the maximal total global utility V Vx .
3167
Fig. 2. The optimal forwarding schedule can be transformed to the maxi-
mum weight bipartite matching problem. The red lines indicate the edges
with the maximal total weight. Hence, xm4 ;t1 xm1 ;t2 xm2 ;t3 1 is the
optimal forwarding schedule, and object m3 is not broadcast due to the
limited contact duration.
The above maximum-utility forwarding model can
actually be transformed to the maximum weight bipartite
matching (MWBM) problem [41]. To represent our maxi-
mum-utility forwarding problem as the MWBM problem,
we create a bipartite graph Gb Mtf [ T ; E, where the
vertex set is the union of the sets of objects and available
time-slots and the edge set E fm; t : m 2 Mtf ; t 2 T g,
as shown in Fig. 2. Each edge e m; t 2 E is associated
with a weight, which is set to the global utility vgm;t that f
can contribute by broadcasting object m in time-slot t, i.e.,
setting xm;t 1.
Note that our model restricts that each object m 2 Mtf
each time-slot t 2 T can be allocated to at most a single
object. Therefore, any feasible solution of the forwarding
schedule x is a matching M in the bipartite graph Gb , where
M is a subset of E such that no two edges in M share an end-
t 2 T , the forwarding schedule xm;t 1 if edge m; t is
included in the matching M, and xm;t 0, otherwise. Then,
we get that the total weight of edges in M
Pexactly equals the
total global utility contribution Vx m2Mt ;t2T xm;t vgm;t .
f
As a result, finding the maximal total global utility V is
equivalent to solving the maximum weight matching in the
(3b) polynomial-time algorithm, called the Hungarian algorithm
[42], to solve the maximum weight bipartite matching, i.e.,
the optimal forwarding schedule x .
(3c)
5.2 Future Contribution Prediction
We now describe how a user predicts its future contribu-
tion by forwarding an object in a specific time slot. Since
(3d) there are no specific destinations in content dissemination
applications, our goal is to propagate objects to as many
users who are interested in them as possible. In contrast to
existing MSN unicast routing protocols that predict the
probability of delivering a message to the destinations,
our model needs each user i to predict the future utility
contribution Ui; m; t that it can contribute by forwarding
object m to all its contacts during t; Tmmax , where Tmmax is
the expiration time of object m. Note that user i can only
contribute object m to any contact j if j does not have
object m when they meet after time-slot t. Intuitively, we
have Ui; m; t  Ui; m; t0 for any time-slots t < t0 if i
does not drop m after t. This is because the number of
users that have not downloaded object m decreases with
time. Therefore, the value of Ui; m; t can be determined
3168 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PARALLEL AND DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS, VOL. 26, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2015

by three factors: 1) the probability that forwarder i can in Eq. (6) involves the value of Fk;m for all users
meet other contacts who have not owned object m after k 2 Vnfjg, j does not really need to solve Fk;m for all
time-slot t; 2) the utility of is contacts on object m; and 3) users. Instead, j only needs to compute Fk;m for its his-
the probability that user i drops object m due to its lim- torical contacts because, if j and k have never met, the
ited buffer space. contact probability 1qjk must be 0. To reduce the com-
To compute Ui; m; t, we start by deriving the probabil- plexity, we let each user j 2 V compute its Fj;m and
ity that a contact j 2 V has not received object m in time- exchange the information about Fj;m with other users
slot t0 from any contacts k 2 V, denoted by Fj;m t0 . Recall k 2 V when they meet. Hence, the computational com-
that we model the contact process of each node pair as a plexity can be shared by all users.
homogeneous Poisson process [22], [23]. We then define We can compute the cumulative probability that i can
the random variable Njk y as the cumulative number of forward object m to contact j between t and Tmmax as follows:
contacts between j and k in continuous-time y with the
max 1
mean contact frequency jk . However, since we formulate X
Tm
T max 1z
the problem as a discrete-time model, we redefine the ran- 1qij qijm Fj;m z: (7)
zt
dom variable Njk y as Njk d
t, which equals the cumulative
number of contacts between j and k until the tth time-slot, However, the object m might be dropped by user i in any
and set Njk d
t Njk Ttx t, where Ttx is the length of a time-slot z due to buffer overflow with a probability di;m z.
time-slot. Without loss of generality, we let any contact in The cumulative probability needs to be rewritten as
time interval Ttx t1; Ttx t start transmitting in time Ttx t, max 1
i.e., the beginning of time-slot t. According to the charac- X
Tm
T max 1z
1qij qijm Fj;m z1  di;m z: (8)
teristics of homogeneous Poisson process, we can compute zt
the probability qjk that j and k will not meet in a time-slot
t by The expected utility that i can contribute to contact j
between t and Tmmax for object m then equals
qjk PNjk Ttx t  Njk Ttx t1 0 ejk Ttx : (4)
max 1
X
Tm
T max 1z
Thus, we can set the contact probability between j and k in ki;j;m t uj;m 1qij qijm Fj;m z1  di;m z:
each time-slot at 1  qjk . We observe that user j will not be zt
able to download object m from user k before time-slot t if
and only if one of two following events occurs: 1) j and k Therefore, the expected total utility that all future con-
have never met before time-slot t, i.e., Njk d
t1 0; or 2) tacts can gain by downloading object m from user i during
the last contact between j and k was in time-slot z < t, but k t; Tmmax can be predicted by
did not have object m in time-slot z. Therefore, the probabil-
1  X Y
X Y 
ity fj;k;m t that j cannot download object m from k before
Ui; m; t n ki;j;m t 1ki;j;m t ; (9)
time-slot t can be computed by F 2Fn j2F
n0 j2
=F

X
t1
fj;k;m t qjk
t1
1qjk qjk
t1z
Fk;m z:
z1
Then, the probability Fj;m t that user j has not downloaded
object m until time-slot t equals the probability that j cannot
download object m from any user k 2 V; j 6 k, before t.
Y bution metric:
Fj;m t fj;k;m t: (6)
j6k
ki;j;m t: (10)
Because Eq. (6) includes the probability qjk of no contact
between j and k, user j has a lower probability Fj;m t if it
can meet other users k 2 V more frequently, i.e., a lower qjk .
Moreover, the contact k will only be helpful if it carries
object m when it meets j. Consequently, j is more likely to
have a lower probability Fj;m t and cache object m in time-
slot t if its contact k has a higher probability of receiving
object m before they meet, i.e., with a lower Fk;m z for all
z < t.
Since only the data sources have object m in the initial
time-slot 1, we have Fk;m 1 0 if k is a data source of
object m and Fk;m 1 1 otherwise. Given the initial
value of Fk;m 1, we can compute the value of Fk;m z
for each time-slot z 2; 3; . . .; t1 iteratively for all users
k 2 V. Note that, even though the computation of Fj;m t
where Fn collects all possible sets that contain exactly n
(5)
contacts. We observe that the computational complexity
of Eq. (9) is relatively high. However, because we only
care about which user can make a larger contribution
and do not concern about the absolute value of Ui; m; t,
we use the following approximation as the final contri-
X
Ui; m; t
j2Vnfig
In Eq. (8), the dropping probability di;m z depends on
the dropping policy of each user. We consider the policy
that each user i drops the object m it is least interested in,
i.e., with the lowest utility ui;m , when its buffer is over-
flowed. Specifically, each user sorts its objects by utility in
ascending order, and drop the first object when it does not
have enough buffer space to cache a new object. Assume
that user i ranks object m as the kth object of interest among
all its objects. The user will drop object m if it receives k
objects with a utility higher than object m after its buffer
becomes full. Say that, in the current time-slot t, user i has a
residual buffer space that can cache additional b objects.
The dropping probability di;m z can then be computed by
CHENG AND LIN: SOURCE SELECTION AND CONTENT DISSEMINATION FOR PREFERENCE-AWARE TRAFFIC OFFLOADING
the following equation:
X
z
di;m z PRi t  t; 0 bPRi z  t; ui;m  k; (11)
tt
where Ri t; u denotes the number of objects with a utility
higher than u received by user i during a period of t time-
slots. Thus, PRi t  t; 0 b indicates the probability that
user i receives any b objects from t to t and leads to a full
buffer, while PRi z  t; ui;m  k is the probability that
user i receives more than k objects with a utility higher than
ui;m during time-slots t; z , as a result dropping object m.
Again, based on [22], [23], we model the contact process of
each node pair as a homogeneous Poisson process, and esti-
mate the above probability as follows:
0 t  tb e
0 tt
PRi t  t; 0 b ; and
b!
X
k1 u
u z  tb e zt
PRi z  t; u  k 1 
b!
b0
where u is the frequency of meeting a user who can con-
tribute an object with the utility higher than u. In other
words, 0 denotes the frequency of meeting a user who
can contribute any object. However, since it is difficult to
predict whether a contact can share an object with the util-
ity higher than u, we approximate the value of u by the
contact frequency multiplied the normalized utility, i.e.,
P
u 0  u= m2Mt ui;m , where Mti is the set of objects
i
owned by user i in t.
6 PERFORMANCE EVALUATION
We evaluate the performance of PrefCast using four real
traces: NUS [43], INFOCOM06 [44], MIT Reality [45], and
UCSD [46]. The NUS trace contains the schedules of the
4,885 classes and 22,341 students for 77 class hours. We ran-
domly select 500 users from the trace in our trace-based sim-
ulations. We assume that two students have contact with
each other if and only if they are in the same classroom,
which follows the same method in [43]. We randomly select
some students in each class to be absent or leave early, and
generate contact patterns outside the classrooms based on
the survey and observations made in [43]. The INFOCOM06
trace includes 78 users who attend the same conference for
a few days; the MIT Reality trace includes 97 users who
work in the same building; the UCSD trace, which is also
used in [11], records the contact history of 275 HP Jornada
PDAs carried by students over 77 days. We consider a sce-
nario where each user can use the broadcast technique,
such as Wi-Fi multicast, to distribute its objects at the trans-
mission rate 1 Mb/s. Each user has a buffer that can store
100 objects.
We use log-based user profiles collected from Last.fm
[47], a database that tracks listening habits of music. We
crawl the webpages of Last.fm and collect the profiles of
8,000 randomly-selected users. For each sampled user, the
profile records top 100 songs it had listened to the most. We
categorize the songs of each user based on their artists, and
3169
let the number of songs owned by a user with the same art-
ist represent its preference (i.e., utility) for any songs of that
artist. For example, if a user has five songs of Maroon 5, that
user has a preference 5 for Maroon 5. That is, it can gain the
utility 5 if it downloads any song of Maroon 5 that is not
cached in its buffer. We let each user in the mobility trace
associate with a randomly-selected listening profile col-
lected from Last.fm, and compute its utility for each object
based on the artist of that object. We repeat each simulation
with 20 random profile associations, and report the average
performance.
6.1 Utility Gain of PrefCast
Our trace-based simulations compare the following
schemes.

Epidemic routing [15]. Each forwarder randomly
(12)
selects an object to broadcast in each time-slot.

PROPHET [16]. It finds the forwarder that has the
highest probability of delivering a message to the
destination using unicast. However, since we con-
; (13)
sider a content dissemination application, we
modify PROPHET to Interest-based PROPHET (or
I-PROPHET), which allows a forwarder to find an
object that can be distributed to the most number of
users. Specifically, we let each user only have a
binary utility for each object, i.e., an interested or
non-interested object, and compute its probability of
having a contact with other users who have not
owned that object. The forwarder then computes the
summation of such contact probability for all group
members who are interested in an object as the
weight of that object, and broadcasts the object with
the highest weight.

Local utility. Each forwarder broadcasts the object
with the highest local utility vl in each time-slot.

PrefCast w/o SS. It uses our preference-aware for-
warding, but applies random source-object selection.

PrefCast w/ community-based SS[9]. It uses our prefer-
ence-aware forwarding, and performs preference-
oblivious community-based source selection [9]. Spe-
cifically, we classify clients into communities based
on the method proposed in [9], and determine
source-object assignment without considering user
preference. We sort the communities in a descending
order of the number of users and select sources from
different communities in a round robin manner until
K sources are picked. To select a proper source from
each community, we pick the user with the most
number of overlapped communities and contacts, as
the source, and assign it a randomly-select object
without considering user preference. For fair com-
parison, we let clients use our preference-aware for-
warding (i.e., Section 5) to distribute content objects.

PrefCast w/ preference-aware SS. It applies both of our
preference-aware source-object assignment and
forwarding.
The first three schemes simply apply random initial
source-object selection. Because the comparison schemes do
not have explicit source selection strategies, for fair compar-
ison, we let all the schemes select a fixed number (100 in our
3170 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PARALLEL AND DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS,
Fig. 3. Cumulative utility over time-slots.
simulations) of source-object assignments. We will evaluate
the performance of dynamically adapting the number of
sources in Section 6.2.
Fig. 3 plots the average utility obtained by each user in
the three traces over time. The figures show that, without
explicit source selection, PrefCast can produce a 15:7 and
22:6 percent higher average utility than I-PROPHET and
Local Utility, respectively, until the deadline. The improve-
ment is mainly because that each forwarder in PrefCast con-
siders the future utility contribution of its members.
Specifically, the utility metric Ui; m; t of a group member i
used in PrefCast not only considers heterogeneous user pref-
erences, but, more importantly, predicts how many users
(including current and future contacts) can gain utility by
obtaining object m from member i. Therefore, a forwarder
can select the object that benefits all users in the system,
instead of an object that only interests local neighboring
users. The figures also show that, in most of the traces,
I-PROPHET performs better than Local Utility. This also
explains that the number of future possible contacts, i.e., the
estimated number of contacts who have not owned the con-
sidering object, has a greater impact on utility contribution
than local preferences.
Moreover, by enabling source selection with consider-
ation of user preferences and the community structure, Pre-
fCast can further increase the total utility by 49:3 percent
over PrefCast without explicit source selection. The
improvement is mainly because our algorithm assigns an
object to the initial sources belonging to the communities
that are more likely to be interested in that object. Hence,
the object can be spread out in those communities through
forwarding, and produce a significant utility gain for users
in the MSN. The results also show that, though preference-
oblivious community-based source-object selection outper-
forms random source-object selection, its performance is
still far below our preference-aware community-based
source-object selection. The main reason is that an object
might be able to be diffused through the whole community,
but the members in the community are not actually
VOL. 26, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2015
interested in that object. Our preference-aware selection
scheme however identifies communities with consideration
of user preference, and hence can distribute objects to those
users of interest.
We next evaluate the impact of the number of source-
object assignments on the performance of comparison
schemes. We vary the number from 10 to 100. Fig. 4 plots
the average utility of all users until the end of the simula-
tions. Generally, more source-object assignments provide
users a higher average utility. However, by selecting proper
initial sources, PrefCast can further achieve a higher utility
gain, especially when more users are allowed to retrieve the
objects via cellular connection from the base-station.
Another thing worth noting is that, when the number of
sources is small, preference-oblivious community-based
source-object selection might perform even worse than
other random selection schemes. This is because only a few
large communities can help disseminate the objects, but
those communities are not interested in the randomly-
assigned objects. This explains that the effectiveness of Pre-
fCast highly relies on how the base-station utilizes limited
cellular bandwidth resources to deliver the objects to well-
selected initial sources.
6.2 Adaptive Number of Source-Object
Assignments
In the above simulations, we show the performance of Pre-
fCast with a given number of source-object assignments.
However, as mentioned in Section 4.2, the trade-off between
traffic offloading and preference utility in PrefCast is deter-
mined by the number of selected assignments, yet a suitable
number of assignments usually changes with the scale of a
mobile social network and heterogeneous user preferences.
Therefore, we now evaluate whether PrefCast can flexibly
determine a suitable number of source-object assignments,
adapting to a mobile social network. In this simulation, we
set the value of n in Algorithms 2 to 5. The deadline of the
NUS, INFOCOM06 and MIT Reality traces are set to 75
hours, 16 hours, and 35 days, respectively.
CHENG AND LIN: SOURCE SELECTION AND CONTENT DISSEMINATION FOR PREFERENCE-AWARE TRAFFIC OFFLOADING
Fig. 4. Impact of number of source-object assignments.
In Fig. 5, we compute the average utility of PrefCast
with a given number of assignments ranging from 1 to
250, and compare it with the average utility of PrefCast
determined by Algorithm 2. We check the performance of
adaptive source selection when the threshold Du is set to
0.025 and 0.05, respectively. For each different threshold,
we plot the corresponding average utility as a horizontal
line in Fig. 5. It is obvious that the smaller threshold we
Fig. 5. Adaptive number of initial sources.
3171
use, the more assignments we can select, and thus higher
average utility we achieve. However, the achievable util-
ity converges as the number of assignments increases. In
other words, when the base-station has selected a suffi-
cient number of assignments, the incremental utility gain
of including a new one decreases. The figures verify our
argument that we can balance the trade-off between cellu-
lar bandwidth usage and preference utility by selecting a
suitable number of assignments. More importantly, we
can see that our adaptive algorithm with an appropriate
threshold, e.g., setting Du 0:025, can achieve an utility
close to the convergence point of preference utility. It
explains that our algorithm can adaptively determine
how many source-object assignments should be selected
for different networks (traces).
6.3 Overhead of Information Feedback
To reduce the overhead of information feedback, we stipu-
late that each user only reports the contact frequency of d
most frequent contacts to the base-station. Therefore, we
now check how much overhead can be saved by such limited
information feedback, and how such incomplete information
affects the achievable utility. Fig. 6a plots the utility of Pre-
fCast when d is set to 1, 3, 5, and unlimited, respectively. The
figure shows that the utility only decreases slightly when we
restrict the amount of information feedback. This explains
that the base-station can exploit partial but significant infor-
mation, i.e., the contact frequency of a few most frequent
contacts, to find a suitable set of initial sources. Nevertheless,
we can observe from Fig. 6b that the total number of mes-
sages required to report the frequency information is
reduced significantly. In particular, setting d 5 achieves a
utility comparable to that using full information, while sav-
ing about 76 percent of message overhead on average.
6.4 Sensitivity Study
We next discuss how PrefCast performs in different environ-
ments with respect to the buffer size, the number of users,
3172 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PARALLEL AND DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS,
Fig. 6. Impact of limited information feedback.
and the transmission range. To take a closer look at the
impact of the above factors on the performance of forward-
ing efficiency, we only compare Local Utility to our PrefCast
without explicit source selection.
Fig. 7 compares the performance of PrefCast when the
dropping probability is considered, as in Eq. (8), or not, as
in Eq. (7). The figure shows that the performance gap
between PrefCast and Local Utility is small when the buffer
size is too small or too large. When the buffer size is too
large, each user can almost cache all the objects it down-
loads from other forwarders and does not need to drop any
objects. On the contrary, when the buffer can only include a
small number of objects, each user can only cache a few
objects and, in general, acquire a low total utility. The
impact of considering the dropping probability is therefore
only obvious when the buffer is large enough but cannot
cache all the objects.
Fig. 8 shows the impact of the number of users on the
utility contribution. Since we can not adjust the number
of users in a real trace, we choose to use the synthetic
trace generated based on SLAW, the state-of-the-art
human mobility model proposed in [48], in this simula-
tion. When there are more users that can help forward
objects, each user can quickly get the objects that it is
interested in. Therefore, the figure shows that the utility
improvement is limited when there are more users in the
network.
Fig. 7. Impact of considering the dropping probability (INFOCOM06).
VOL. 26, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2015
Fig. 8. Impact of number of users (SLAW).
Fig. 9 shows the impact of the transmission range of
each mobile device on the utility contribution using
SLAW. Each synthetic trace includes 150 users. Again, we
choose SLAW in this simulation because the real traces
only specify the contact event without the explicit geomet-
ric location information. However, the SLAW mobility
model assigns each user a geometric location. Note that
more users can overhear the transmission of an object
from a forwarder if the forwarder has a longer transmis-
sion range. Thus, when there are more members in a for-
warders group, the forwarder generates a significant
local utility, which dominates the benefit of future contri-
butions. This is the reason that the performance gap
between PrefCast and Local Utility decreases when the
transmission range increases.
7 CONCLUSION
In this paper, we propose PrefCast, a preference-aware
protocol that offloads cellular traffic for content dissemi-
nation applications through opportunistic communica-
tions with consideration of heterogeneous user
preferences. To balance the trade-off between cellular
bandwidth requirement and the utility gain, we investi-
gate two issues, 1) source-object assignment and 2) for-
warding scheduling, such that the base-station can use as
few cellular bandwidth as possible to maximally satisfy
user preferences. Our source-object selection algorithm
exploits the community structure of a mobile social net-
work to designate suitable users to help disseminate the
assigned objects. We then formulate the maximum-utility
forwarding scheduling model that allows each forwarder
to predict its future utility contribution and determine its
optimal forwarding strategy in a distributed manner
accordingly. The trace-based evaluation shows that, with-
out explicit source selection, PrefCast can provide a higher
total utility than the preference-oblivious and local-pref-
erence-based dissemination schemes. Enabling source
selection in PrefCast further improves the total utility by
49.3 percent.
Fig. 9. Impact of transmission range (SLAW).
CHENG AND LIN: SOURCE SELECTION AND CONTENT DISSEMINATION FOR PREFERENCE-AWARE TRAFFIC OFFLOADING
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work is partially supported by the National Science
Council, National Taiwan University and Intel Corporation
under Grants NSC102-2911-I-002-001, NSC102-2221-E-001-
012-MY2 and NTU103R7501.
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Hsueh-Hung Cheng received the BS degree
from the Department of Computer Science and
Information Engineering, National Taiwan Univer-
sity in 2011. After his graduation, he served in
Navy as an Information and Network Reserve
officer from December 2011 to July 2012. Cur-
rently, he is a research assistant in Research
Center for Information Technology Innovation at
Academia Sinica, Taiwan. His areas of research
interest include E-home, traffic offloading and
network mobility.
VOL. 26, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2015
Kate Ching-Ju Lin received the BS degree from
the Department of Computer Science, National
Tsing Hua University in 2003, and the PhD
degree from the Graduate Institute of Networking
and Multimedia, National Taiwan University in
2009. She was a visiting scholar at CSAIL, MIT
from March 2007 to March 2008 and from Octo-
ber 2010 to March 2011. After her graduation,
she joined Research Center for Information Tech-
nology Innovation at Academia Sinica, Taiwan.
She is currently an associate research fellow.
Her current research interests include MIMO systems, wireless multime-
dia networking, and mobile social networks. She is a member of the
IEEE and ACM.
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