Opportunistic mobile social networks: Challenges survey and application in smart campus

Abstract

With the high penetration of smart phones in our daily life and the increasing capabilities of these smart devices, a new type of applications has emerged. Lately, Opportunistic Mobile Social Networks (OMSN), which allow users to directly update their social networks while moving have seen the day. Typically, users require the Internet to share information on their social network and this produces various limitations. However, OMSN exploit opportunistic links between mobiles' of users with social similarities to share contents and updates, bypassing the need for an Internet connection. In this paper, a survey on OMSN applications and existing architectures is provided. Key challenges to the development of these networks are elaborated along with suggested solutions. An architecture for collaborative learning application using OMSN that tries to answer these challenges is presented. A prototype is implemented and deployed to validate the proposed solution. Clearly, OMSN can be an addition to the smart campus initiative.