An Adaptive Content Sharing Protocol for P2P Mobile Social Networks

In Mobile Social Networks (MSN) users can participate in communication based on their mutual interests. Typical implementations of Social Networks involve client/server architecture where a user needs to subscribe to a server for content sharing with other clients. Popular Online Social Network providers have recently extended the web based service into the mobile domain. However due to mobility and connectivity issues this architecture is in-adequate in providing peer to peer content sharing services to mobile users. Many solutions for Mobile Ad Hoc networks have been proposed however content based communication in partially or intermittently connected MANETs has been a recent research area. In this paper we present an adaptive protocol to facilitate implementation of a Mobile Social Network based on peer to peer content driven communication when end-to-end connectivity is not possible. The proposed protocol takes into account the information about user's interests, content based data storing and forwarding, and host mobility in a disconnected, delay tolerant MANET.