Professor Junshan Zhang
Arizona State University, USA

Title: A New Paradigm for Mobile Social Networking:  Social Tie, Group Utility Maximization and Privacy

Abstract:  The combination of exploding demand and limited resources poses a significant challenge for future wireless network design.  Since  hand-held devices are carried by human beings, we advocate a social aware approach to enhance cooperative networking. Such cooperation among   mobile devices with trust enables self-organizing networking, and has potential to achieve substantial gains in spectral efficiency and lead to significant increases in network capacity. In particular, mobile devices are coupled in the physical domain  due to the interference relationship in data transmissions, and also coupled in social domain due to the social ties among them. It would be a win-win case for these devices to help those users having social trust with them. With this insight, we cast cooperative wireless networking  with social trust as a  physical-social game, where  each user carries out resource allocation to maximize its social group utility, defined as the weighted sum of its own utility and the utilities of other users having social trust towards it. We pursue a thorough understanding of the physical-social game formulation, aiming to establish a general social group utility maximization framework that bridges non-cooperative game theory and social welfare maximization - two traditionally “disjoint” paradigms for network optimization and design. We will also touch upon related privacy issues.

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