In Vivo Evaluation of the Secure Opportunistic Schemes Middleware using a Delay Tolerant Social Network

TL;DR

This paper presents the SOS middleware enabling secure, real-world evaluation of routing schemes in delay-tolerant social networks, demonstrated through the AlleyOop Social iOS platform.

Contribution

Introduction of the SOS middleware that simplifies implementation of routing schemes and security in delay-tolerant social networks, validated via a practical iOS application.

Findings

SOS middleware facilitates real-world testing of routing schemes.

AlleyOop Social demonstrates secure, intermittent social networking on iOS devices.

The platform supports message exchange and interest discovery in delay-tolerant environments.

Abstract

Over the past decade, online social networks (OSNs) such as Twitter and Facebook have thrived and experienced rapid growth to over 1 billion users. A major evolution would be to leverage the characteristics of OSNs to evaluate the effectiveness of the many routing schemes developed by the research community in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we showcase the Secure Opportunistic Schemes (SOS) middleware which allows different routing schemes to be easily implemented relieving the burden of security and connection establishment. The feasibility of creating a delay tolerant social network is demonstrated by using SOS to power AlleyOop Social, a secure delay tolerant networking research platform that serves as a real-life mobile social networking application for iOS devices. SOS and AlleyOop Social allow users to interact, publish messages, and discover others that share common interests in an intermittent network using Bluetooth, peer-to-peer WiFi, and infrastructure WiFi.