Event-Based Mobile Social Networks: Services, Technologies and Applications

Event-based Mobile Social Networks (MSNs) are a special type of mobile social network that has an immanently temporal common feature which allows any smart phone user to create events to share group messaging, locations, photos and insights among participants. The emergence of Internet of Things (IoT) and event-based social applications integrated with contextawareness ability can be helpful in planning and organizing social events like meetings, conferences, and tradeshows. This paper first provides review of the event-based social networks and the basic principles and architecture of event-based MSNs. Next, event-based MSNs with smartphone contained technology elements such as context-aware mobility and multimedia sharing are presented. By combining the feature of context-aware mobility with multimedia sharing in event-based MSNs, event organizers and planners with the service providers optimize their capability to recognize value for the multimedia services they deliver. The unique features of the current event-based MSNs give rise to the major technology trends to watch for designing applications. These mobile applications and their main features are described. At the end, discussions on the evaluation of the event-based mobile applications based on their main features are presented. Some open research issues and challenges in this important area of research are also outlined.基于事件的移动社交网络（Event-based Mobile Social Networks，MSNs）是一类特殊的移动社交网络，其具备内在的时序共性特征，允许任意智能手机用户创建活动，在参与者间共享群组消息、位置信息、图片与观点见解。随着物联网（Internet of Things，IoT）与具备上下文感知能力的事件型社交应用的出现，其可助力规划与组织各类社交活动，例如会议、论坛与商贸展会。本文首先综述了基于事件的社交网络，以及基于事件的移动社交网络的基本原理与架构。随后，本文介绍了搭载智能手机相关技术元素的基于事件的移动社交网络，这类技术包括上下文感知的移动性与多媒体共享功能。通过将上下文感知移动性与多媒体共享的特性融入基于事件的移动社交网络，活动组织者、策划者可与服务提供商协同优化其为用户提供的多媒体服务的价值识别能力。当前基于事件的移动社交网络的独特特性，催生了应用设计领域需重点关注的核心技术趋势，并对这类移动应用及其主要特征进行了阐述。文末，本文基于应用的核心特征，对基于事件的移动应用的评估方法展开了讨论，并概述了该重要研究领域中尚未解决的研究问题与面临的挑战。