PeopleNet: engineering a wireless virtual social network

People often seek information by asking other people even when they have access to vast reservoirs of information such as the Internet and libraries. This is because people are great sources of unique information, especially that which is location-specific, community-specific and time-specific. Social networking is effective because this type of information is often not easily available anywhere else. In this paper, we conceive a wireless virtual social network which mimics the way people seek information via social networking. PeopleNet is a simple, scalable and low-cost architecture for efficient information search in a distributed manner. It uses the infrastructure to propagate queries of a given type to users in specific geographic locations, called bazaars. Within each bazaar, the query is further propagated between neighboring nodes via peer-to-peer connectivity until it finds a matching query. The PeopleNet architecture can overlay easily on existing cellular infrastructu...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: MOBICOM
• Authors: Mehul Motani, Vikram Srinivasan, Pavan Nuggehalli
• Keywords: MOBICOM 2005, Query Propagation, Social Networking, Swap Model