Enabling Social Interactions off the Grid

The popularity of proximity-based applications has increased, but the network services needed to enable effective and energy-efficient application performance have yet to catch up. This is especially the case for users who want to operate "off the grid" in a purely local fashion. Essentially, the success of such applications depends on the availability of services that provide information about other nearby users and their devices. Additionally, the availability of multiple radios (such as Bluetooth, Zigbee, and Wi-Fi) makes this problem of energy-efficient discovery all the more challenging-yet all the more achievable.