SMS: Collaborative Streaming in Mobile Social Networks

Mobile social applications have emerged in recent years. They explore social connections among mobile users in a variety of novel scenarios, including friend finding, message routing, and content sharing. However, efficiently supporting resource-demanding delay-sensitive streaming applications on the mobile platform remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we study collaborative VoD-type streaming of short videos among small groups of mobile users, so as to effectively exploit their social relationships. Such an application is practically set in a number of usage scenarios, including streaming of introductory video clips of exhibition items to visitors’ mobile devices, such as in a museum. We design SMS, an architecture that engineers such Streaming over Mobile Social networks. SMS constructs a collaborative streaming overlay by carefully inspecting social connections among users and infrastructural characteristics of Bluetooth technologies. We evaluate our design based on prototype implementation on the Android platform.