Towards a feasible social-based methodology to manage wireless connectivity context data

Wireless connectivity context data is composed by date, time, geographical localization, and QoS metrics, to cite the most common. These data are employed, in a particular way, by fundamental techniques for context-aware connectivity management, e.g. mobility predictors, handoff mechanisms and mobility management. For instance, mobility and QoS predictors use, as input, previous georeferenced network context data. Normally, context data are available in hardly updated databases with considerable size. In this paper, we propose a social-based methodology to allow mobile users collaborate to discover wireless connectivity islands. The methodology is composed by methods to gather, combine, summarize and share context data inside the users´ social circles. We, also, designed a schema to mashup context data with location-based social media. It is result of a prototyping effort and we focus the discussion on its feasibility and limitations in terms of storage size, power consumption and QoS metrics.