Wi-friend: Identifying potential real life friends nearby

Nowadays, with the help of various on-line social networking applications, one can freely interact with any person in their friends list. However, in most conditions, people in your friends list are those you know a priori, either via face-to-face talking or introducing by a common friend. This way of establishing ones friends list can miss many potential friends nearby. These ‘potential real life friends nearby are those who are invisible to you (you do not know before), physically close to you (e.g. taking the same subway for commuting, doing exercises at the same time slot), and share the same interest with you. Correspondingly, we developed Wi-friend. Wi-friend, once installed in your mobile phone, can help to find these ‘potential friends nearby’. Using Wi-friend, one only needs to briefly specify his/her interest. Then the smartphone starts to look for nearby people with the same interest and add each other into ones friends list automatically. One special feature of Wi-friend is that it does not rely on Internet connection. We leverage the Wi-Fi tethering technique, and let ones smartphone to switch between Wi-Fi hot-spot mode and Wi-Fi client mode to exchange information with nearby people. In addition, Wi-friend can dynamically determine how long to stay in each mode to maximize the number of people who can exchange information. Extensive experiments and simulations demonstrated the technical feasibility and the effectiveness of our Wi-friend system.