MobiClique: Middleware for Mobile Social Networking

1
MobiClique Middleware for Mobile Social
Networking
WOSN09 2nd ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Online
Social Networking 17.08.2009, Barcelona, Spain

• Anna-Kaisa Pietilainen (Thomson),
• with Earl Oliver (University of Waterloo), Jason
  LeBrun (UC Davis),
• George Varghese (UCSD), Christophe Diot (Thomson)

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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

3
Outline

• MobiClique Design Principles
• System Architecture
• User Trials and Performance
• Conclusion and Future Work

4
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

5
System Overview
6
Middleware Operation on Mobiles

• Neighborhood discovery
• Bluetooth device discovery, broadcast beacons
  over WiFi
• User identification
• Social profile exchange
• 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

8
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
CoNEXT07 CoNEXT08
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

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

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Contact Opportunities (CoNEXT07)
600
500
Any Participant
400
Shared Interest
300
200
49
100
Friend
25
0
Day 1 800
Day 2 800
Day 3 800
2000
2000
2000
Day 4 800
11
Bluetooth Connectivity (CoNEXT07)
10
100
8
Avg success rate 50
Participant
6
Count
4
Success rate
2
Connected
0
2030
830
1430
230
1430
830
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Social Network Evolution (CoNEXT07)
Avg. degree 9,18
Avg. degree 5,11
Initial Friendship Graph
Final Friendship Graph
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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 users 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

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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!