Design And Implementation Of Message Forwarding Scheme In MSNP (Mobile Social Networking In Proximity) On Android

The existing social network service mainly adopts client/server(C/S) mode, and the user’s sensitive information is stored in the service provider’s servers, which cause the problem of "privacy". In some specific environment(e.g., proximity area), the direct interaction network will help solve the problems brought by the centralized architecture and continuous Internet connection in the mobile social networks(MSN). MSN in proximity(MSNP) is a kind opportunistic network and use geographical proximity to find peers and services directly.MSNP topology always changes continually. The establishment and maintenance of end-to- end path is not feasible. Therefore, it needs to design fully distributed message forwarding scheme. Based on this background, the thesis designs and implements a message forwarding scheme. It aims to provide a distributed and lightweight message forwarding scheme which can reflect the dynamic characteristics of MSNP accurately. Specifically, the work contributions of this thesis lie in the following aspects:Firstly, this thesis introduces the background knowledge of message forwarding in MSNP and provides the taxonomy of message forwarding strategies. We summarize and compare the various message forwarding schemes including location-based and encounter-based(further divided into social property based and community-based) strategies. Then, we present open issues in MSNP forwarding strategies and their potential solutions to bring forward-looking visions to MSNP research.Secondly, the thesis designs a lightweight and distributed message forwarding scheme in MSNP, which explicitly takes into account the social centrality and social similarity of each participant. Compared to the existing message forwarding schemes, the scheme provides a distributed random walk method which can infer social centrality of nodes without global social information and reflects the dynamic characteristics of MSNP accurately. Therefore, it is more suitable for message forwarding in MSNP.Finally, on the Android platform, using Bluetooth technology, the designed message forwarding scheme is preliminarily implemented. The results show that it works well. Based on the application, we conduct an experiment to measure the social centrality of nodes. The experiment demonstrates that the designed scheme can distributed infer the social centrality of nodes. We compare the design scheme to the existing message forwarding schemes Prophet and Epidemic, and results show that the designed scheme outperform the Prophet by 5.1%, the delivery cost is lower than the Prophet.