CAMEO: A novel context-aware middleware for opportunistic mobile social networks

Mobile systems are characterized by several dynamic components like users’ mobility, devices’ interoperability and interactions among users and their devices. In this scenario context-awareness and the emerging concept of social-awareness become a fundamental requirement to develop optimized systems and applications. In this paper we focus on a novel category of pervasive and mobile systems designed to implement new services and applications that improve users’ social interactions through the use of mobile devices. Specifically, we present CAMEO, a light-weight context-aware middleware platform designed to support the development of real-time Mobile Social Networks (MSN). MSN extend the paradigm of Online Social Networks with additional interaction opportunities generated by users’ mobility and opportunistic wireless communications. MSN are aimed at creating new and on-demand virtual social networks among mobile users which share interests, habits and needs by providing owngenerated contents and without requiring a stable Internet connection. CAMEO provides to MSN applications a set of optimized services for the collection and elaboration of multidimensional context information in addition to efficient opportunistic communication protocols. A prototype of CAMEO has been implemented on Android platform.