A cooperative social and vehicular network and its dynamic bandwidth allocation algorithms

This paper investigates into a special type of network that encourages cooperation between its upper layer social network and lower layer wireless communication network with particular focus on commuters on the road. Regarded as a branch of mobile social networks, the so-called vehicular social network (VSNs) proposed in this paper needs to consider both social aspects (such as social ties through common interests) and physical network operational mechanisms to design a system that is effective to its users and efficient to network resources. This calls for in-depth investigations into the correlation between social behaviours and network algorithms. This paper aims to making some preliminary exploration into this exciting field by investigating into how social centrality, an important concept in social network analysis, makes impact on dynamic bandwidth allocation (DBA) in a specific scenario of vehicular social networks. In particular the paper introduces centrality into the utility function's formula, based on which DBA is carried out in IEEE 802.16j-enable vehicular networks.