Mobile Social Networks Platform Design And Prototype Implementation Based On Wi-Fi Direct Peer-to-peer Technology

Abstract: With the development of the mobile Internet, as well as the popularity of smartdevices and mobile social networks, one of the main functional requirements for mobile users is tocommunicate, establish or maintain social relations and share information and data with relatives,friends or even nearby strangers anytime and anywhere. In the existing social networking servicescommonly using Client/Server (C/S) model, users have to adopt the infrastructure networks (i.e.,access to Internet firstly) for the social communication and data sharing among them, even thoughthey locate in proximity area. But, for some scenario that the user may not want to access theInternet for social networking (e.g. in proximity area), Due to lack of support of central server, mostcurrent social applications services would not meet the above specific demand of end users. On theother hand, transmitting the large amount of data generated by social networking through Internet,will bring a lot of pressure to the server, and moreover, from economical viewpoint, the price ofdigital traffic through network infrastructure may cause the user cannot get the best service.Based on the above consideration, our paper analyzes and implements a location-based Wi-FiDirect social networking services, which can enhance local interactions among people (with smartmobile terminal) without using the costly Internet access: keep social communication and realizedata sharing, when they are in proximity area. Specifically, the contributions of this thesis lie in thefollowing aspects.Firstly, based on the analysis of various related technologies and applications: Wi-Fi Directtechnology, peer-to-peer network, the state-of-art of the mobile social applications, we propose,design and implement Wi-Fi Direct based P2P social networking framework in Android platform,which aims to address the requirement of communicating with peers without using the cellularnetwork and static Wi-Fi access point.Then, with the underlying Wi-Fi-based P2P communications infrastructure, we design fourbasic components for social networking in proximity area: Wi-Fi Direct connection managementcomponent, localization component based on Google Map, Chat component, and file-sharing component that support discontinuous transmission. Our design provides a new way for P2P socialnetworking sotfware development.Finally, the prototype of our proposed Wi-Fi Direct P2P social networking platform issuccessfully implemented. The effects of various components are also graphically provided, whichillustrate the implemented prototype can work smoothly. And the results summary and analysiswere also offered, which provide a reference for the subsequent development.