Drive and share: efficient provisioning of social networks in vehicular scenarios

Social Networks are one of the latest revolutions in networking, allowing users with common interests to stay connected and exchange information. They have enjoyed great success not only for traditional Internet users, but also for mobile users. Recent efforts are also being done to make social networks available within vehicles. However, to exploit social networks at their full potential in a vehicular context a number of technical challenges and design issues need to be faced. In this article, we analyze those challenges and present an innovative solution for providing Social services on the vehicle based on IP Multimedia Subsystem and Machine to Machine capabilities. To demonstrate the viability of the proposed scheme we present a social network service called Drive and Share which offers relevant information to vehicles using our proposed architecture.