Mobile social networks: state‐of‐the‐art and a new vision

Abstract

SUMMARY Social networks have attracted much attention and are gaining increasing momentum in communities, academia and industries. The mobilization of social networks, thus mobile social networks (MSNs), has equally been widely used, driven by the rapid advancement of both wireless network technologies and mobile devices. In light of the many works on MSNs focusing on its various different aspects, this paper aims to provide an overall view of this young and exciting field by summarizing its key research activities/categories and analyzing their interrelationships. Furthermore, the paper goes one step further by presenting a new vision of MSNs, which brings its other equally important arm, that is, mobile communication networks, into the horizon of MSN research. This new vision advocates the seamless integration of both arms, each located at different layers, that is, social networks at the application layer and mobile wireless networks at the network and communication layers. This integration calls for a cross‐layer information exchange of the two layers for the benefit of the MSN as a whole. The methodologies that shall be adopted by this new vision of MSN and the upcoming research challenges faced by this new field are discussed. It is hoped that this paper can serve as a seed to spark wider and deeper discussions and research activities on this new field of MSNs, where social computing activities and mobile wireless network researches embrace each other to create an era where all stakeholders in the MSN supply chain and in particular end‐users benefit. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Community‐based traffic preservation in telecommunication networks

“…This combines the interaction information obtained from the traffic level ( Figure 1) together with the interconnection information derived from the network topology ( Figure 2). A similar cross-layer information exchange has been recently proposed in [12].…”

Socially Aware Networking: A Survey

“…In the meantime, it requires support from a number of technologies such as mobile sensing, opportunistic computing, and social network analysis (SNA). Recently, several research fields have emerged as socially aware paradigms which share some common attributes with SAN, such as mobile social networks [10], social opportunistic networks [11], vehicle social networks [12], opportunistic Internet of things (IoT) [13], etc. They all address mobile nodes and are driven by social network theory.…”

CONCOR: context-aware community-oriented routing for intermittently connected network

“…However, it is very expensive in terms of message traffic and buffer *Correspondence: rahul@ipu.ac.in 1 USICT, Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, Sector 16C, Dwarka, Delhi 110078, India Full list of author information is available at the end of the article space, which reduces the life of the network. To overcome the problem of heavy traffic and high buffer requirement, probabilistic routing [4,5] and social routing [6][7][8][9][10] schemes were proposed. Both the approaches provide considerable improvement in the delivery ratio under low buffer requirement.…”

“…In this work, we present a routing approach, contextaware community-oriented routing (CONCOR), that exploits the existence of social groups [10] along with the context awareness of nodes for efficient routing of the messages in DTN. The context [11] has been defined as set of attributes that represent various characteristics of a system, such as available buffer space, maximum buffer space, information about node's community etc.…”