With the development of wireless communication, the popularity of android phones, the increasing of social networking services, mobile social networking has become a hot research topic. Personal mobile devices have become ubiquitous and an inseparable part of our daily lives. These devices have evolved rapidly from simple phones and SMS capable devices to Smartphone’s and now with android phones that we use to connect, interact and share information with our social circles. The Smartphone’s are used for traditional two-way messaging such as voice, SMS, multimedia messages, instant messaging or email. Moreover, the recent advances in the mobile application development frameworks and application stores have encouraged third party developers to create a huge number of mobile applications that allow users to interact and share information in many novel ways. In this paper, we elaborate a flexible system architecture based on the service-oriented specification to support social interactions in campus-wide environments using Wifi. In the client side, we designed a mobile middleware to collect social contexts such as the messaging, creating group, accessing emails etc. The server backend, on the other hand, aggregates such contexts, analyses social connections among users and provides social services to facilitate social interactions. A prototype of mobile social networking system is deployed on campus, and several applications are implemented based on the proposed architecture to demonstrate the effectiveness of the architecture.
Mobile social networking aided content dissemination in heterogeneous networks
