Towards a Smart Campus with Mobile Social Networking

With the development of wireless communication, the popularity of smart phones, the increasing of social networking services, mobile social networking has become a hot research topic. The characteristics of mobile devices and requirements of services in social environments raise a challenge on building a platform for mobile social services. In this paper, we elaborate a flexible system architecture based on the service-oriented specification to support social interactions in campus-wide environments. In the client side, we designed a mobile middleware to collect social contexts such as the proximity, the cell phone log etc. The server backend, on the other hand, aggregates such contexts, analyses social connections among users and provides social services to facilitate social interactions. A prototype of mobile social networking system is deployed on campus, and several applications are implemented based on the proposed architecture to demonstrate the effectiveness of the architecture.