Quality of experience-enabled social networks

Abstract

Social Networks (SNs), such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, have become ubiquitous in our daily life. However, as the number of SN users grows there is higher demand for users' Quality of Experience (QoE). Some users may prefer to subscribe to a higher Quality of Service (QoS) level with their SN provider, e.g. to have higher priority on posting/retrieving, when for instance there are outages like the Twitter outage that happened during the Oscars 2014. In addition some users may wish to filter some posts, e.g. unwanted friendship requests. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture that enables differentiated QoS and information filtering in SNs to improve the users QoE. Our SN runs on top of 3GPP 4G Evolved Packet Core (EPC)-Based systems, and it uses EPC services to enable differentiated QoS. The components of our architecture interact through RESTful web services. Our architecture allows users to filter posts through their own criteria and have priority over other users in posting and/or retrieving.