WiFace: a secure geosocial networking system using WiFi-based multi-hop MANET

A number of mobile online social networking (OSN) services appear in the market. Majority of mobile systems can strongly benefit from services offered by cloud. However, centralized servers and communication infrastructures may not always be available. Further their location-based services are not offered to low-end mobile devices without GPS modules. To build a system that can take advantage of cloud, and also can address these potential problems that could hinder OSN usage, we design and construct a multi-hop networking system named MoNet based on WiFi, and on top of which we design and implement WiFace, a privacy-aware geosocial networking service. For the situation without any infrastructure, we design a distributed content sharing protocol which can significantly shorten the relay path, reduce conflicts and improve data persistence and availability. A role strategy is designed to encourage users to collaborate in the network. Furthermore, a key management and an authorization mechanism are developed to prevent some attacks and protect privacy. We conduct comprehensive experiments to evaluate the performance of our mobile platform MoNet and application WiFace. The results show that MoNet is more than sufficient to support social networking, and even audio and video applications.