STARS: Ad-hoc peer-to-peer online social network

Abstract

Online social networks allow people to exchange information in their social lives. Most famous online social networks today such as Facebook, Twitter, or Linkedin are centralized. Users do not have much control over their personal data and every transaction around users requires the appearance of their service providers. This paper introduces a decentralized approach to building social networking based on ad-hoc Peer-to-Peer architecture in order to remove the bound of a centralized provider and provide a flexible way of connecting people. The proposed system focuses on bringing the ownership of user data back to the owner and allows user to build Interest-based network with high responsiveness and direct data exchange. The working implementation focuses on mobile device platform such as Android and iOS based smartphone with security techniques. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.