A CCN-based Social Network application optimising network proximity

Online Social Networking (OSN) applications attracted millions of people in few years and are considered as the success story of current Internet applications. However, how they work is unclear for both end-users and researchers, since the developers keep the system architecture secret and use encryption mechanisms. In this paper, we present the main outcomes of our analysis of one of the most well known OSNs, Twitter, focusing on the networking behaviour, the involved entities, their location, etc. Detecting that the current network behaviour of those applications is not in line with current end-users behaviours, where locality is important, we propose to adapt the OSNs to a Content-Centric Networking (CCN) approach, which could improve the delivery and reduce the network load and server load. Indeed, CCN is a new networking paradigm focusing on interest based requests of content itself independently on location and so has features very close to OSNs. This paper then introduces our proposal for a CCN-based architecture for OSN applications, with a naming and routing proposal. We also present the demonstrator we have implemented as proof-of-concept and the testbed we set up for functional testing purposes.