Proactive seeding for information cascades in cellular networks

—In today’s Internet, online social networks (OSNs) play an important role in informing users about content. At the same time, mobile devices provide ubiquitous access to this content through the cellular infrastructure. In this paper, we propose Proactive Seeding– a technique for minimizing the peak load of cellular networks, by proactively pushing (“seeding”) some content to the users before they actually request it. We exploit the fact that the interest in the content is spread over OSNs, which makes it, to certain extent, predictable. We develop a family of algorithms that take as input information cascades, and possibly the background traffic load or the local connectivity among mobiles, and select which nodes to seed and when. We prove that Proactive Seeding is optimal when the prediction of information cascades is perfect. In our simulations, driven by traces from Twitter and cellular networks, Proactive Seeding leads to 20%-50% reduction in the peak load.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Francesco Malandrino, Maciej Kurant, Athina Markopoulou, Cédric Westphal, Ulas C. Kozat
• Keywords: Cellular Infrastructure, Communications, INFOCOM 2012, Online Social Networks, Peak Load