Experiments in Mobile Social Networking

In this report we consider a mobile ad hoc network setting where users of Bluetooth enabled devices meet and communicate opportunistically as when random people meet in a cafe, or researchers meet at a conference. Ad hoc opportunistic contacts are built on the basis of pre-defined relationships in online social networks. Our approach distinguishes itself from previous work in the area by three characteristics: the removal of a need for a central server to conduct exchanges, the focus on the transitive closure of relationships, and the use of existing social networks as a reference point for understanding whether an exchange is desirable. We design MobiClique, a social interaction communication software package that we implement on smartphones. We develop three applications: ad hoc social connections, epidemic newsgroups and asynchronous messaging. We describe our experience with 28 users at a networking conference. We discover that despite the usual experimental hazards, MobiClique was successful at building a local social network and delivering more than 300 user generated messages over 3 days through multi-hop epidemic communication.