Heterogeneous wireless access technology and its impact on forming and maintaining friendship through mobile social networks

Advances in wireless access technology have enabled mobile users to gain access to online social networks anywhere and any time. This paper investigates friendship formation in online social networks with the support of heterogeneous wireless access. A network-aware friendship formation model is proposed that takes the network communication cost into account. A social network-aware scheduling scheme is also proposed that schedules user data into a wireless access subsystem satisfying the minimum QoS requirements and with the lowest delivery cost. Simulation results have verified the proposed model and showed the effectiveness of the proposed scheduling mechanism. Copyright (c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.