SOLVER: A Framework for the Integration of Online Social Networks with Vehicular Social Networks

Online social networks (OSNs) are comprised of people with social interactions and relationships, such as friendship and acquaintance. Social web communities (e.g., Facebook or Twitter), and content-sharing sites with social networking functionality (e.g., YouTube), have attracted millions of users, and OSNs are continuing to grow, with a giant number of users. At the same time, new social services are emerging, moving social networking from traditional OSNs toward vehicular social networks (VSNs). VSNs consider a social network where every vehicle is capable of establishing social ties in an autonomous way with other vehicles or drivers/passengers. However, limitations exist in VSNs, such as reduced connectivity due to mobility models and the opportunistic nature of vehicular networks. Similar considerations apply in OSNs, where the centralized architecture may suffer from high traffic load. In this article, the integration of OSNs with VSNs is realized through a hybrid framework that merges the centralized structure of OSNs with the distributed opportunistic nature of VSNs. The proposed hybrid OSN-VSN framework, named SOLVER, allows communications both among different VSNs and toward OSN communities, in order to maintain connectivity and service that can be affected by mobility. Connectivity holes of VSNs can be limited through a handover procedure toward an OSN community, and traffic load in an OSN can be redirected to specific VSNs in order to release network resources in OSNs, with the consequent reduction of transmission delay. SOLVER presents a solution for maintaining connectivity in VSNs and extending it toward OSNs, and vice versa. Security and privacy issues are also addressed through the use of a multi-layer security approach adopted in SOLVER. As a main strength, SOLVER is able to synergistically exploit the positive features of OSNs and VSNs, as well as providing security and privacy, with mechanisms that are completely agnostic to the final users.