The Case of Multi-hop Peer-to-Peer Implementation of Mobile Social Applications

In this paper we consider issues related to the design of mobile social software in a multi-hop peer-to-peer environment. We believe that by enabling multi-hop peer-topeer communication could in certain cases make social mobile applications more attractive in terms of location privacy or embarassement, but also more effective in terms of the quality and quantity of the matches achieved. Such an approach could thus contribute in the construction of a critical mass which is necessary for the success of these applications and probably one of the reasons they are not yet widely deployed. On the other hand, it introduces significant implemention challenges related to the contruction and management of a dynamic ad-hoc network. We focus on the provision of the suitable incentives for packet forwarding which is a fundamental problem that needs to be addressed in this context since the ad-hoc nature of the mobile social applications constitutes pricing and reputation (or accounting) based approaches of limited applicability. In this paper we argue that suitable memory-less mechanisms should be devised sketching two such mechanisms for different types of packets exchanged in a mobile social application. Interestingly, as we explain, our proposed mechanisms enforcing contribution while consuming have a more general applicability and could also be used in other applications such as the peer-to-peer resource sharing in ubiquitous computing. We finally discuss several strategic issues that should be also taken into account but are ignored by the corresponding literature and more specifically the consideration of mobility and power transimission as part of the rational strategy of peers participaing in such a system.