On Sharing Viral Video over an Ad Hoc Wireless Network

We consider the problem of broadcasting a viral video (a large file) over an ad hoc wireless network (e.g., students in a campus). Many smartphones are GPS enabled, and equipped with peer-to-peer (ad hoc) transmission mode, allowing them to wirelessly exchange files over short distances rather than use the carrier’s WAN. The demand for the file however is transmitted through the social network (e.g., a YouTube link posted on Facebook). To address this coupled-network problem (demand on the social network; bandwidth on the wireless network) where the two networks have different topologies, we propose a file dissemination algorithm. In our scheme, users query their social network to find geographically nearby friends that have the desired file, and utilize the underlying ad hoc network to route the data via multi-hop transmissions. We show that for many popular models for social networks, the file dissemination time scales sublinearly with n, the number of users, compared to the linear scaling required if each user who wants the file must download it from the carrier’s WAN.