When Wireless Crowd Charging Meets Online Social Networks: A Vision for Socially Motivated Energy Sharing

Individual users of a social crowd are bound by finite resource capacity. Other users (such as online friends) may have surplus capacity or resources that, if shared, could be used to meet fluctuating demand. A particularly important resource in modern societies is the energy supplies of mobile portable devices like smartphones; quick energy depletion is an everyday problem in the lives of billions of smartphone users worldwide. Peer-to-peer wireless crowd charging has recently emerged as an alternative energy replenishment option. Although there have been some recent advances on this type of wireless energy sharing, to the best of our knowledge, none of the related works has considered using online social network information as input. In this paper, for the first time in the state of the art, we introduce the vision of socially motivated wireless energy sharing and we provide a holistic framework for socially aware wireless crowd charging. We present a taxonomy of the existing representative use cases, and we define a model which takes into account not only the wireless power transfer specifics, but also the online social information. After having selected a target use case (balanced crowd energy efficiency), we design two socially aware wireless energy sharing protocols. The design of each protocol is inspired by the social topology and structural characteristics of diverse datasets of online social relationships among real users. In fact, aligning to studies on psychology which conclude that users typically favor friends over strangers in allocating resources (especially when the sharing task is costly), our protocols favor energy exchanges among friends or friendly groups. For the purposes of the protocol evaluation, we simulate the energy sharing interactions based on the user encounters, as reported in the datasets. In order to demonstrate the effects of the social component, we compare the performance of our protocols to the performance of another state of the art protocol that does not use online social information. Interestingly enough, we demonstrate that online social network information can indeed influence the selected use case, in terms of energy losses, as well as level of and time elapsed until a balanced energy distribution in the crowd. We conclude the paper by providing some interesting open research directions.