Crowdsourcing-Based Content-Centric Network: A Social Perspective

Driven by the rapidly growing demand for multimedia service, CCN is conceived as an important component for the next-generation network to facilitate information distribution and meet individual needs. This article investigates how to integrate the crowdsourcing technique and the CCN into a coherent whole, for the purpose of significantly improving the performance of CCN. Specifically, we first propose a CCCN that mainly contains two parts, i.e., mobile participants and a server cloud. Second, we design a complementary social-enhanced communication strategy that exploits the social characteristics for this framework, in order to develop a systematic understanding of the interplay between social characteristics and crowdsourcing. Extensive simulations have been conducted, and the results demonstrate that our social strategy can achieve significant performance improvement. Finally, we discuss open issues about security and management that may arise in the future CCCN framework.