A convergent framework for QoS-driven social media content delivery over mobile networks

Advanced socio-technical systems especially handheld and mobile devices are no longer esoteric; rather they are a part of daily life for billions of people worldwide endowing a sense of every time connectedness. With larger bandwidths, powerful processing capabilities, better displays, user friendly and haptic interfaces, mobile platforms holds a promising future for social applications. However, advances in web technologies have led to the development of complex set of applications that demands a nimble and robust architecture that is adaptive to the network constraints. This has resulted in a favorable playground for mobile-aware social applications offering practitioners and researchers key architectural challenges with numerous fledgling opportunities. In this article, we elaborate upon the challenges and provide a framework for incorporating cross-layer interaction between social applications and wireless network capabilities. Specifically, we address the problem of delivering social network content to mobile devices with the required QoS. We propose a generic framework that addresses this issue. We also discuss some suitable wireless network protocols that could be utilized to provide QoS for the delivery of content generated by social applications and for reliable interactions between mobile users and social applications followed by possible future research directions.