An architecture for M2M enabled social networks

Social Networks (SNs) are becoming more and more popular. Individuals are now more connected than ever before. They share information with their family, friends and colleagues. However, sharing physical phenomena in SNs is still a manual process done by people themselves. The automated sharing of ambient information in SNs can promote independent living by enhancing the autonomy and confidence of the elderly or handicapped individuals via continuous monitoring and health support. We propose an architecture for enabling Machine-to- Machine (M2M) communication in SNs to support the automatic sharing of physical phenomena. As part of this architecture, we propose a scalable M2M gateway along with a proof of concept prototype and its partial evaluation.