Service-oriented mobile social network in proximity

Accessing online Social Network Services (SNS) such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ from mobile devices (e.g., Smart phones) has become a daily activity to many users. With the powerful and rich capabilities of recent mobile devices, users can produce heterogeneous content such as photos, videos, audio, and share them with their social groups. From the users' perspective, mobile devices are no longer simple client-side medium to acquire content from online content providers, but they have become content providers as well. Embedded Web server enhances the usefulness of mobile devices in terms of content sharing. With embedded Web server, mobile devices can provide various mobile Web services (MWS). Moreover, users are capable of establishing a new form of social network in the mobile peer-to-peer (P2P) manner, in which a group of proximal users, who whether they know one another or not, can perform various SNS activities within the same wireless network. The term-Mobile Social Network in Proximity (MSNP) has been used in this thesis to illustrate such an environment. MSNP is a composite social network environment in which MSNP participants can either share content data directly from their MWS or they can simply conduct their MWS to provide links that redirect content requesters to retrieve content from the providers' SNS spaces. In recent years, realising MSNP became an interested topic to many researchers. Since the fundamental infrastructure of MSNP is based on mobile P2P network, enabling MSNP inherits many common challenges of mobile P2P applications in terms of mobility issues, hardware resource constraint issues, security-related issues, and so on. While the existing MSNP-related works were designed for particular applications and platforms, this thesis aims to provide a solution to enable a generic service-oriented MSNP environment, in which the mobile users can participate in the environment using heterogeneous devices and platforms. In this thesis, two related major challenges service discovery and resource management of MSNP have been addressed. Service discovery in MSNP faces latency issues which are caused by the long makespan of service discovery and identification of trustworthiness of the service providers. The issues have been analysed in this thesis. Corresponding solutions: context-aware proactive service discovery for MSNP and the lightweight trustworthy service discovery for MSNP are presented, together with experimental evaluation. Since MSNP is a composite environment, in which local services in mobile device and remote online Web services are involved, resource management becomes a crucial task in service discovery and also in other MSNP activities. The hardware resource of mobile device and the availability of remote online Web services, can influence the efficiency of how a mobile device performs its activities in MSNP. This thesis has analysed the challenge in resource management of MSNP and proposed a corresponding mediation framework: Adaptive Mediation Framework for MSNP (AMSNP) that applied workflow technique and Enterprise Service Bus architecture to manage resources dynamically and let the mobile device automatically choose a feasible approach to perform its activities according to the situational changes of resources. A prototype has been implemented and evaluated based on several case studies