Social networks adding community-scale to context-aware connectivity management

People are accessing online social networks wherever they go through smartphones and tablets. These mobile devices are capable to sense, compute and communicate, allowing people to create and consume rich digital content anywhere. Popular social applications are attaching geographical localization to user-generated digital content, creating geo-tagged social media. Given the heterogeneity of current wireless environments (i.e., multiple access providers and communication technologies) it is challenging to keep mobile devices best connected anywhere. In this paper, a wireless connectivity manager is designed as a sensing system. The mobile device's wireless interfaces are the sensors and the collected context data is shared attached to geo-tagged social media. The goal was take advantage of popular location-based web applications to delivery connectivity context data within social circles. As part of a sensing system, online social networks adds scale to the system and allow collaboration around fresh, local, personalized and social context data. Simulations were performed to quantify how collaboration evolves, to discover connectivity opportunities in a specific place, as function of community size and users mobility patterns.

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