P2P-based Mobile Social Networks

Contact information sharing is a fundamental aspect of establishing social networks, which have already been implemented using Web technologies. Users can be notified when their friends update their contact information. The Web-based social networks already extend to the mobile social networks. By using smart phone applications, such as Facebook or Twitter, individuals with similar interests can converse and connect with one another closely. Normally, these mobile social network applications adopt Web-based friend relationships and do not provide a mobile peer-to-peer connection directly. Additionally, social networks are tightly connected through user interests or groups to facilitate a more efficient relationship. Therefore, each user can belong to more close and diverse groups based on their preferences. However, there is no well-defined solution for a mobile social network protocol, as well as a distributed database for contact information synchronization. Contact information synchronizing can be performed through Google or Yahoo accounts. However, this would only work well if the users are used the accounts with the same company, and would not work if the users had accounts from different service providers. Thus, it makes sense for smartphones to update the contact information through a P2P approach through a centralized server. This paper presents a mobile WAN P2P platform. In addition to this platform, contact information synchronization is implemented as well as researched by UDP hole punching. As a result, data synchronization between two Android smartphones was shown by Wireshark with a public IP and private IP. The test results indicate that mobile P2P in WAN helps current client-server architecture develop different P2P architectures. Moreover, regarding IPv6 use, hybrid IPv4/IPv6 architecture is recommended for implementing in the future.