Recurring contact opportunities within groups of devices

The capability to anticipate a contact with another device can greatly improve the performance and user satisfaction not only of mobile social network applications but of any other relying on some form of data harvesting or hoarding. One of the most promising approaches for contact prediction is to extrapolate from past experiences. This paper investigates the recurring contact patterns observed between groups of devices using an 8-year data-set of wireless access logs produced by more than 70000 devices. This effort permitted to model the probabilities of occurrence of a contact at a predefined date between groups of devices using a power law distribution that varies according to neighbourhood size and recurrence period.

In the general case, the model can be used by applications that need to disseminate large data-sets by groups of devices. As an example, the paper presents and evaluates an algorithm that provides daily contact predictions, based on the history of past pairwise contacts and their duration.