Flocks: enabling dynamic group interactions in mobile social networking applications

  • Authors:

  • Elisa Gonzalez Boix;Andoni Lombide Carreton;Christophe Scholliers;Tom Van Cutsem;Wolfgang De Meuter;Theo D'Hondt

  • Affiliations:

  • Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussel, Belgium;Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussel, Belgium;Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussel, Belgium;Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussel, Belgium;Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussel, Belgium;Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussel, Belgium

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2011 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
  • Year:
  • 2011

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Mobile social networking applications enable end-users to interact on the move. Current applications model user groups as simple lists which have to be manually enumerated. This representation is both unsuitable and inefficient for group interactions: due to the openness and the mobility to which these applications are exposed, the contents of such lists are likely to change frequently. Updating the lists manually while interacting with users quickly becomes impractical. In this paper, we introduce an alternative representation for user groups named flocks. A flock represents a loosely-defined user group in terms of an intensional description. The flock content is implicitly updated when changes occur, e.g. the users's location. Flocks have group interaction provisions based on asynchronous message passing. Benchmarks indicate that flocks can be implemented efficiently by exploiting structure in their definitions. We present the flock abstraction and its implementation as the basis of a new distributed framework called Urbiflock.