Selfishness, Altruism and Message Spreading in Mobile Social Networks

Many kinds of communication networks, in particular social and opportunistic networks, rely at least partly on humans to help move data across the network. Human altruistic behavior is an important factor determining the feasibility of such a system. In this paper, the authors study the impact of different distributions of altruism on the throughput and delay of mobile social communication system. The authors evaluate the system performance using four experimental human mobility traces with uniform and community-biased traffic patterns.