Online social network information can influence wireless crowd charging

Quick energy depletion is an everyday problem in the lives of billions of smartphone users worldwide. Among the various methods for energy replenishment of battery powered devices like smartphones, the recent paradigm of wireless crowd charging has been gaining more and more attention. Having even limited knowledge on the crowd network properties can be crucial for the crowd energy conservation protocol design. A key characteristic of such crowds is the active presence and involvement of the users in online social networks. In this paper, we suggest (for the first time in the state of the art) the exploitation of online social information in order to tune the wireless crowd charging process. We examine a dataset of encounter records and corresponding self reported online social network data of a group of people. Based on the online social graph structure, we design a wireless crowd charging protocol which targets at balancing the available energy among the mobile users in the crowd while maintaining low energy losses. Based on the reported daily encounters of the users, we simulate wireless crowd charging for seven consecutive days and we compare the performance of our protocol with the performance of another state of the art protocol which does not use online social information. Interestingly enough, we demonstrate that online social network information can indeed influence the wireless crowd charging process.