Mobile network-aware social computing applications: a framework, architecture, and analysis

Advanced socio-technical systems especially handheld and mobile devices are no longer esoteric; rather they are a part of daily life for billions of people worldwide endowing a sense of every time connectedness that helps in realizing the ideology behind social computing applications (such as, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, SecondLife, etc.), i.e., sharing whatever-whenever. With larger bandwidths (3G/4G/WiMax capabilities), powerful processing capabilities, better displays, and user friendly and even haptic interfaces, mobile platforms have shown a promising future for social computing applications. However, advances in web technologies (such as HTML5, AJAX, etc.) have led to the development of complex set of applications with rich user-interfaces that demands a nimble and robust architecture for social computing applications that is adaptive to the network constraints and bottleneck issues. This has resulted in a favorable playground for mobile-aware social computing applications offering practitioners and researchers key architectural challenges with numerous fledgling opportunities. In this article, we elaborate upon the challenges and provide a framework for incorporating cross-layer interaction between social network applications and wireless network capabilities. Specifically, we address the problem of delivering social network content to mobile devices with the required QoS. We propose a generic framework that addresses this issue. We also discuss some suitable wireless network protocols that could be utilized to provide QoS for the delivery of content generated by social computing applications and for reliable interactions between mobile users and social computing applications followed by possible future research directions.