Collaborative Service Discovery in Mobile Social Networks

Abstract

Mobile social networking is a recent paradigm arisen from the wide spread of mobile and wearable devices. Based on the short-range communication interfaces of these devices it is possible to establish opportunistic communications among them and build networks independent to the global one. Challenges introduced by this new type of networks are related to the sharing of resources and services and to the exploitation of the communication opportunities among devices. Limit of existing algorithms, that have sought to fill these shortages, is the lack of attention on the main actor of this service-oriented chain, the user. To this purpose, we introduce the COllaborative seRvice DIscovery ALgorithm (CORDIAL) that leverages both mobility and sociality of the users. We evaluate the performance of CORDIAL combined with different routing protocols for opportunistic networks, and we compare it with a benchmark algorithm (S-Flood) based on flooding and another service discovery algorithm designed to leverage mobile social network features, namely, ServIce DiscovEry in Mobile sociAl Networks (SIDEMAN). Our results show that the performance of CORDIAL remains stable with the different routing algorithms and that, in function of the query forwarding strategy triggered, CORDIAL matches the performance of S-Flood in terms of Query Response Time, achieving a better proactivity score with respect S-Flood and SIDEMAN as well.