Abstract

The popularity of handheld devices has created a flurry of research activity into new protocols and applications that can handle and exploit the defining characteristic of this new environment – user mobility. In addition to mobility, another defining characteristic of mobile systems is user social interaction. This paper investigates how mobile systems could exploit people’s social interactions to improve these systems’ performance and query hit rate. For this, we build a trace-driven simulator that enables us to re-create the behavior of mobile systems in a social environment. We use our simulator to study three diverse mobile systems: DTN routing protocols, firewalls preventing a worm infection, and a mobile P2P file-sharing system. In each of these three cases, we find that mobile systems can benefit substantially from exploiting social information.

 

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