MobiClique: Middleware for Mobile Social Networking

Anna-Kaisa Pietilainen (Thomson), with Earl Oliver (University of Waterloo), Jason LeBrun (UC Davis),

George Varghese (UCSD), Christophe Diot (Thomson)

WOSN’09: 2nd ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Online Social Networking17.08.2009, Barcelona, Spain

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Mobile Social Networking?

Plenty of resources on smartphones Content can be created and stored Many contact opportunities using various radio interfaces

Limitations of current social networking services Closed or limited access and proprietary data formats and

APIs Do not take advantage of real social contacts and mobility

Get the best of both worlds ! Create ad-hoc communities and social networks Exchange content with friends while on the move

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Outline

MobiClique Design Principles

System Architecture

User Trials and Performance

Conclusion and Future Work

MobiClique Design Principles

Leverage existing online social networks Avoid creating ‘yet-another-service’

Decentralized, ad hoc operation Free, no third parties involved, context & mobility aware

Build and maintain an ad hoc social network and connections Social networking (i.e. meet new people and communities) Content sharing and messaging over multiple hops in the social

network overlay

Provide an open API for mobile social and opportunistic networking applications

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System Overview

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Middleware Operation on Mobiles

1. Neighborhood discovery Bluetooth device discovery, broadcast beacons over WiFi

2. User identification Social profile exchange

3. Data exchange Store-carry-forward style communication Unicast messages forwarded over the friendship graph or upon

direct contact Multicast messages flooded within the interest group TTL defined using an absolute timestamp and/or hop count

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The Applications

Mobile social networking

Asynchronous messaging

Epidemic newsgroups

New: ad hoc voting

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Prototype Implementation

Builds on the Haggle architecture prototype Data-centric opportunistic communications

Windows Mobile platform Programmed in C++ and C#

Bluetooth connectivity Reasonable battery life in normal use (charge daily) Discovery performed every 2 minutes for 10.24s RFCOMM device to device communication links

Social profile initialization using Facebook Simple desktop application to setup the MobiClique social

profile

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Experimental Setup

CoNEXT’07 CoNEXT’08

Place New York, USA Madrid, Spain

Duration 3.5 days 3.5 days

Participants 28 22

Active time 56.91h 56.70h

Inactive time 30.72h (49.80%) 22.19h (30.07%)

Bluetooth contacts 15 918 11 352

Total final friend links 257 64

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• HTC s620 Windows Mobile Smartphone• 200 MHz TI processor• 64MB RAM, 128MB ROM, MicroSD slot• Bluetooth v1.2

Contact Opportunities (CoNEXT’07)

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Day 18:00

Day 28:00

Day 38:00

Day 48:00

20:00 20:00 20:00

100

200

300

400

500

600

0

Any Participant

Shared Interest

Friend25%

49%

Bluetooth Connectivity (CoNEXT’07)

Tue08:30

Tue14:30

Tue20:30

Wed02:30

Wed08:30

Wed14:30

Time

0

2

4

6

8

10

Coun

t

Succ

ess

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

TotalInternalContactedContact SuccessAvg Success Avg success

rate 50%

Successrate

Cou

nt

0Connected

2

4

6

Participant

8

10

8:30 20:30 8:3014:30 2:30 14:30

100%

11

Social Network Evolution (CoNEXT’07)

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Initial Friendship Graph Final Friendship Graph

Avg. degree 5,11 Avg. degree 9,18

Conclusion and Future Work

MobiClique creates and maintains an ad hoc mobile social network for opportunistic content dissemination

Two user trials to collect unique 3-day traces combining user’s social behavior and interaction, contact opportunities and opportunistic messaging

On going and future work Lab test to improve system parameters Improve the prototype: connectivity, forwarding, resource

management, security Publish the source code and the collected traces

1304/10/23

This is NOT the end ….

Join the MobiClique SIGCOMM 2009 experiment!

Catch one of us or come to the MobiClique

desk near the registration area

Thanks!