Mobility-assisted energy-aware user contact detection in mobile social networks

Many practical problems in mobile social networks such as routing, community detection, and social behavior analysis, rely on accurate user contact detection. The frequently used method for detecting user contact is through Bluetooth on smartphones. However, Bluetooth scans consume lots of power. Although increasing the scan duty cycle can reduce the power consumption, it also reduces the accuracy of contact detection. In this paper, we address this problem based on the observation that user contact changes (i.e., starts and ends of user contacts) are mainly caused by user movement. Since most smartphones have accelerometers, we can use them to detect user movement with much less energy and then start Bluetooth scans to detect user contacts. By conducting experiments on smartphones, we discover three relationships between user movement and user contact changes. According to these relationships, we propose a Mobility-Assisted User Contact detection algorithm (MAUC), which triggers Bluetooth scans only when user movements have a high possibility to cause contact changes. Moreover, we propose energy-aware MAUC (E-MAUC) to further reduce energy consumption during Bluetooth discovery, while keeping the same detection accuracy as MAUC. Via trace driven simulations, we show that MAUC can reduce the number of Bluetooth scans by half while maintaining similar contact detection rates compared to existing algorithms, and E-MAUC can further reduce the energy consumption by 45% compared to MAUC.