Community Membership Management for Transient Social Networks

Confluence of technologies represented by geo-location, geo-sensing, context and activity recognition, and smart phones with rich sensors is opening up new avenues for media-rich social interactions for a spectrum of applications from entertainment, to commerce, to emergency response. This paper addresses the challenges in membership management of a transient social network (TSN), a community of users with mobile devices engaging in social activities of common interest within specific temporal and geographical locality (e.g., flea market, emergency response, local auctions, etc.). Creating and maintaining viable transient social communities requires solving a number of significant challenges including managing the dynamically created social graph, maintaining connectivity across heterogeneous nodes and interfaces and efficient message delivery among the nodes in a community. Micrograph is a middleware for managing community membership in TSNs. It helps nodes to discover and participate with other nodes based on device-level, or application-level attributes. It allows a node to simultaneously participate in multiple distinct social communities by overlaying multiple TSNs on top of the available nodes in the physical network. Micrograph gives complete isolation for the activities of a node in each of the TSNs that a node may be participating in simultaneously and it also gives complete transparency to a participant as to the membership of a TSN in which he/she is involved in. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of Micrograph, a proof-of-concept implementation of the middleware using Android platforms, four applications to show the feasibility of Micrograph, and simulation-based evaluation of the implemented prototype.