A Semantics-based Approach to Large-Scale Mobile Social Networking

Mobile ad hoc social networks are selfconfiguring social networks that connect users using mobile devices, such as laptops, PDAs, and cellular phones. These social networks facilitate users to form virtual communities of similar interests or commonalities. This paper proposes semantics-based mobile social network (SMSN), a novel framework of a fully functional mobile ad hoc social network that incorporates semantics of users’ social data. SMSN provides effective and efficient solutions to social network construction, semantics-based user profile matching, multi-hop semantics-based routing, and privacy management. Moreover, SMSN is rigorously benchmarked using an elaborate simulation setup and released as a prototype system that can be run on cellular phones. Due to its generality, SMSN can be applied to a wide range of critical applications, such as disaster-recovery, homeland security, and personnel control.