SOLVER: A Framework for the Integration of Online Social Networks with Vehicular Social Networks

Anna Maria Vegni (1) , Valeria Loscrì (2) , Abderrahim Benslimane (3)

1 COMLAB - Digital Signal Processing Multimedia & Optical Communications Laboratory [Rome]
2 FUN - Self-organizing Future Ubiquitous Network
3 LIA - Laboratoire Informatique d'Avignon

Online Social Networks (OSNs) are comprised of people with social interactions and relationships, such as friendship and acquaintance. Social web communities (e.g., Facebook or Twitter), and content-sharing sites with social networking functionality (e.g., YouTube) have attracted millions of users, and OSNs are keeping on growing, with a giant number of users. At the same time, new social services are emerging, moving social networking from traditional OSNs towards Vehicular Social Networks (VSNs). VSNs consider a social network where every vehicle is capable of establishing social ties in an autonomous way with other vehicles or drivers/passengers. However, limitations in VSNs exist, like the reduced connectivity due to mobility models and the opportunistic nature of vehicular networks. Similar considerations apply in OSNs, where the centralized architecture may suffer of high traffic load. In this paper, the integration of OSNs with VSNs is realized through a hybrid framework that merges the centralized structure of OSNs with the distributed opportunistic nature of VSNs. The proposed hybrid OSN-VSN framework, namely SOLVER, allows communications both among different VSNs and towards OSN communities, in order to maintain connectivity and service alive that can be affected by mobility. Connectivity holes of VSNs can be limited through a handover procedure towards OSN community, as well as traffic load in OSN can be redirected to specific VSNs in order to release network resources in OSNs, with the consequent reduction of transmission delay. SOLVER presents a solution for maintaining connectivity in VSN and extending it towards OSN, and vice versa. Security and privacy 2 issues are also addressed through the use of a multi-layers security approach adopted in SOLVER. As a main strength, SOLVER is able to synergically exploits the positive features of OSNs and VSNs, as well as providing security and privacy, with mechanisms that are completely agnostic to the final users.

Mots clés: Vehicular Social Networks; Online Social Networks; Framework; Network architecture

Domaines: Informatique; Informatique [cs]

Anna Maria Vegni, Valeria Loscrì, Abderrahim Benslimane. SOLVER: A Framework for the Integration of Online Social Networks with Vehicular Social Networks. IEEE Network, In press, ⟨10.1109/MNET.001.1900259⟩. ⟨hal-02178424⟩