Implementation of Network Coding for Social Mobile Clouds

Cooperation is known as an effective strategy in nature to achieve individual or common goals and is a key element in evolution for optimization, as Darwin pointed out in his famous work. Cooperation among weaker individuals (such as hyenas) has the potential to outperform stronger individuals (cheetahs) agnostic to the principle of cooperation.

The concept of cooperation has been applied to mobile communication networks with the first appearance of so-called ad hoc networks or meshed networks. But this kind of cooperation is a special form of cooperation, later referred to as forced cooperation, controlled by an overlay unit and not built up by selfish individuals.

In a column article published in the November issue of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, the authors discuss the possibility to increase the potential of cooperation among selfishly driven users by introducing novel technologies such as network coding as well as socially driven incentives, in the research field of social mobile clouds. The interested readers can learn more about this topic from this article.