Applications, architectures, and protocol design issues for mobile social networks: A survey

The mobile social network (MSN) concept combines social science and communications science and has created a new research area that is relevant for content publishing, data exchange, sharing, and delivery services. This paper starts with a brief overview of MSNs. The major applications of MSNs are then reviewed. Architectures of MSNs for different data exchange, sharing, and delivery services are described. Issues related to the design and analysis of MSNs are presented, and related work in the literature is reviewed. Finally, several major open research issues are discussed, and future research directions are outlined.