Social networks meet next generation mobile multimedia internet ...

COMMAG_GUEST_EDITORIAL-Mohan.qxp_Guest Editorial 10/1/15 5:27 PM Page 124

GUEST EDITORIAL

SOCIAL NETWORKS MEET NEXT GENERATION MOBILE MULTIMEDIA INTERNET

Seshadri Mohan

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Nitin Agarwal

Ashutosh Dutta

ith ever growing popularity and widespread adoption of mobile social applications, the traffic handled by mobile networks and the Internet has grown significantly. While researchers have been making advances in the study of social networks and independently in the area of next generation wireless networks, very little attention has been given to the interplay between the two, and their impact on each other and society. The challenge of the interplay between social networks and mobile networks is compounded by the fact that advances in smart handheld devices and those in wireless technologies have paved the way for increasing bandwidth catering to very high data rates. Sophisticated social applications such as Second Life, and those involving 3D and real-time data can take advantage of such advances. It is entirely likely that such advances in turn could lead to novel social applications not yet thought of. For example, new social applications could emerge in the area of social health or social games with new forms of massively multi-player, multimedia, 3D, and role playing games. Next generation wireless (5G and beyond) will emerge that will likely place more emphasis on device intelligence, for example, by exploiting cognitive radio, context, and device-todevice communications. It is also likely to exploit software defined networking, cloud, software-defined radio access networks, and massive MIMO with vastly increased bandwidth that is orders of magnitude more than is available at present, and offer mobile user equipment the ability to establish ad hoc and peer-to-peer communications. These new capabilities will in turn serve as a catalyst to usher in more sophisticated social applications. Applications already exist that can create ad hoc mobile social networks. For example, FireChat can rapidly create an ad hoc mobile network over Bluetooth and WiFi among a large number of users, and their widespread usage globally could facilitate the creation of global ad hoc networks. Much research has been carried out in the field of social networks involving modeling the growth of social networks and mining of massive information collected through social networks. The results provide insights into human behavior in their interactions with social networks and the formation of new research areas. The emergence of research in the area of big data and its applicability to social networking can hardly

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Sudhir Dixit

Ramjee Prasad

be overemphasized. Together, the evolution and deployment of cloud RANs, and cloud-based and software-defined networks could lead to new forms of big data, for example, involving user locations, usage patterns, user mobility, and other user-specific behavior. Also, the ability on the part of next generation networks to facilitate peer-to-peer and ad hoc networking paves the way for new forms of interactions with mobile social networks and applications. Hence, important research questions arise while attempting to understand the interplay between mobile social networks and the next generation mobile multimedia Internet. This Feature Topic (FT), which serves as the sequel to the June 2012 IEEE Communications Magazine FT, Social Networks Meet Mobile Networks,1 assembles six interesting articles that address several important issues within the highly complex interdisciplinary field addressing the theme of the FT. In these articles readers can find answers to a set of key questions that are bound to stimulate further interest and research. In the first article, “Socially Enabled Wireless Networks: Resource Allocation via Bipartite Graph Matching” by Wang et al., the authors answer the question: how do social interactions between users and users’ devices influence resource allocation, including radio spectrum, and impact the design of next generation wireless networks? The authors approach the problem first by defining social graphs and interest graphs, where a social graph represents the social tie between users through either real life relationship such as family members, classmates, and colleagues, or social media such as Facebook and LinkedIn, and an interest graph represents the users’ interests such as hobbies, watching similar categories of movies, or other similar interests. Subsequently, through a hierarchical bipartite graph partitioning approach, they define an upper layer bipartite graph to pair users with similar social ties and interests, and argue that such an approach would reduce the cost of content sharing. In a similar manner, a lower layer bipartite graph is defined in which social ties and 1

S. Mohan, N. Agarwal, and A. Dutta, Guest Editors, “Social Networks Meet Mobile Networks,” IEEE Communications Magazine, June 2012.

IEEE Communications Magazine • October 2015


GUEST EDITORIAL interests are resolved into radio resource requirements and facilitate the sharing of radio resources. The second article, “Location-Based Social Video Sharing over Next Generation cellular Networks” by Roy et al., addresses the question: would sharing of location information improve the usage of social applications in a community and improve the quality of experience (QoE) of users? They argue that due to the increasing need to share video content in the social context among users, there is an urgent need to devise novel solutions to minimize CAPEX, increase efficiency, and improve user QoE. They propose that by sharing the location information of the users between 4G LTE mobile network operators, not only would the routing of live video streaming be done more efficiently, but users’ overall QoE would improve significantly by reducing jitter, supporting higher bit rate streams, and reducing latency in video playback start time. In a manner similar to sharing location information as proposed by the previous article, by exploiting the knowledge of mobility patterns of users in a community, can efficient routing protocols be designed for sharing and distributing content? The third article, “NCCU Trace: Social-Network-Aware Mobility Trace” by Tsai et al., addresses the challenge with an approach to collect mobility traces and model them. The article studies the impact of users’ mobility on the routing protocols for delay-tolerant networks, as this would be largely determined by social networking behavior. Using a locationand behavior-aware Android application, the authors have collected the mobility traces of college students in a campus environment and designed a mobility model to capture such movement. The mobility traces were then imported into a simulator to verify the performance of the routing protocols and evaluate the performance of social-based routing methods. Simulation results show that this trace-based mobility model is much closer to the real movement situation and can evaluate the performance of social-based routing method. Extending the previous questions further, how could a network become socially aware with knowledge of communities to facilitate efficient sharing of content such as video? The fourth article, “Social-Aware Mobile Peer-to-Peer Communications for Community Multimedia Streaming Services,” by Xu et al., addresses this question. The article discusses the challenges in defining and implementing a virtual community, that is, a socially aware mobile multimedia community (SMMC), for sharing and delivering multimedia content, and presents an overview of the work on the estimation methods for similarity in terms of demand, socialization, and mobility. The authors describe an approach for community construction and suggest an integrated network context-aware concurrent multi-path transmission solution for content delivery. They also compare performance between the proposed scheme and an alternative solution, the ant-inspired mini-communitybased solution for video-on-demand services (AMCV). With the ever increasing popularity of crowdsourcing as a powerful paradigm in harnessing the knowledge and work of a large number of people to accomplish a given task (e.g., the compilation of Wikipedia), how does one evaluate the reliability and trustworthiness of information or data generated, and how do crowdsourcing and mobile sensing impact each other? Participatory computing, especially crowdsourcing, has been tremendously influenced by smart mobile and handheld devices. Chen et al., the authors of the fifth article, “When Crowdsourcing Meets Mobile Sensing: A Social Network Perspective,” have leveraged crowdsourcing to enhance mobile sensing, thereby demonstrating a synergistic advancement of both the disciplines (i.e., mobile networks


and human computation). Mobile sensing has emerged from several decades of research on wireless sensor networks and as a result of recent technological advances that have transformed multiple mobile devices into one multipurpose sensing device. Mobile sensing utilizes agent-participatory data to improve decision making, but such data could be extremely noisy. Consequently, identifying trustworthy data and reliable agents becomes an essential task in mobile sensing. The article leverages the concepts of wisdom of crowds from the social networks discipline to address this challenge. Authors have conducted evaluations of their model on real-world data and report promising findings. The authors’ work has farreaching implications not only in the mobile networks domain but also in human computation, citizen science research, crowdsourcing tasks, and many other participatory computing paradigms. Since data sharing assumes utmost importance in crowdsourcing and mobile sensing applications, can systems be designed that allow sharing of the collected data independent of the communications infrastructure, its capabilities and location, and applications that require the data? In the last article of this FT, “Pervasive Data Sharing for Support of Mobile Citizen Sensing Applications,” Moreira and Mendes provide insight into the effect of pervasiveness of large-scale sensing systems, and how this may lead to improvement of social and personal welfare by exploiting novel mobile citizen sensing applications. They also underscore the need for these devices to be able to share sensing data independent of the available communication infrastructure, their location, and applications that make use of this data. The authors have taken a pragmatic and constructive engineering approach to define a process for the design of a pervasive data sharing application. They give an introduction to the networking requirements of mobile citizen sensing and propose four design paradigms that represent basic building blocks for the solutions. We strongly believe that the set of articles in this FT will stimulate further research and create a venue to bring together researchers and practitioners from different disciplines, especially computer and information sciences and next generation mobile/wireless multimedia Internet/networks as well as other related disciplines to share, exchange, learn, and develop preliminary results, new concepts, ideas, principles, and methodologies, aiming to advance mobile networks in the information and communication technologies involved in next generation mobile multimedia Internet. We hope the readers enjoy these articles as much as we did!

BIOGRAPHIES SESHADRI MOHAN ([email protected]) is currently a professor in the Systems Engineering Department at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR), where, from August 2004 to June 2013, he served as chair of the Department of Systems Engineering. Prior to his current position, he served as the chief technology officer with Telsima, Santa Clara, California; chief technology officer with Comverse, Wakefield, Massachusetts; a senior research scientist with Telcordia, Morristown, New Jersey; and a member of technical staff with Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, New Jersey. Besides his industry positions, he also held faculty positions at Clarkson and Wayne State Universities. He has authored/coauthored over 100 publications in the form of books, patents, and papers in refereed journals and conference proceedings. He co-authored the textbook Source and Channel Coding: An Algorithmic Approach. He has contributed to several books, including Mobile Communications Handbook and The Communications Handbook. He holds 14 patents in the area of wireless location management and authentication strategies as well as in the area of enhanced services for wireless. He is the recipient of the SAIC Publication Prize for Information and Communications Technology. He has served or is serving as a Technical Editor of IEEE Personal Communications (now IEEE Wireless Communications), IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, and IEEE Communications Magazine. He has also served as a Guest Editor for several Special Issues and Feature Topics in IEEE Network, IEEE Communications Magazine, and ACM MONET. He

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GUEST EDITORIAL served as a Guest Editor of the March 2012 IEEE Communications Magazine Feature Topic “Convergence of Applications Services in Next Generation Networks” as well as the June 2012 Feature Topic “Social Networks Meet Wireless Networks.” He is the recipient of the 2010 IEEE Region 5 Outstanding Engineering Educator Award. He coauthored the paper “A Multi-Path Routing Scheme for GMPLS-Controlled WDM Networks” presented at the 4th IEEE Advanced Networks and Telecommunications Systems, which received the Best Paper Award. He holds a Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from McMaster University, Canada, a Master’s degree in electrical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India, and a Bachelor’s degree in electronics and telecommunications from the University of Madras, India. NITIN AGARWAL is the Jerry L. Maulden-Entergy Chair Professor of Information Science at UALR. His research interests lie in the areas of social computing (e.g., knowledge discovery in social media, modeling social dynamics including collective action, influence, trust, community evolution, and collective intelligence), data mining and machine learning (especially big “social” data analytics), and privacy. In this direction, he has developed an interdisciplinary research program on social computing at UALR with foundational as well as applicational contributions. Foundational contributions are made to computational social network analysis; social science theories such as collective action, collective behavior, and homophily; data mining; privacy; and virtual organizations. The applicational contributions include, but not limited to, event analysis, monitoring cyberthreats through social media, smart health and wellbeing, social media in learning environments, network and communication, and socially aware mobile networks. Aside from information science, the research program brings together researchers from various disciplines such as social science, economics, political science, communication and organization science, and computer and mobile networks and practitioners including defense analysts from NATO, U.S. Naval Research Lab, Dillards, Acxiom, @WalmartLabs, and other organizations. The research has resulted in publications in various prestigious forms, including 5 books, 19 journal articles, 13 book chapters/encyclopedia entries, and over 50 conference proceeding papers. The research studies have received the Best Information System Publication of 2012 Award recognized by the AIS Senior Scholar Consortium, a Best Paper Award, and several best paper nominations. He has guest edited several Special Issues for Elsevier Journal of Systems and Software, Oxford’s The Computer Journal,Springer’s Lecture Notes in Social Networks, IEEE Communications Magazine, Elsevier Journal of Computational Science, and IEEE Internet Computing. His research has been supported by grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR), U.S. Air Force Research Lab (AFRL), and U.S. Army Research Office (ARO). He obtained his Ph.D. in computer science from Arizona State University with outstanding dissertation recognition in 2009. He has a Bachelor’s of Technology in information technology from the Indian Institute of Information Technology, India. For more details see http://ualr.edu/nxagarwal/. ASHUTOSH DUTTA [SM] is a Senior Member of the ACM. He obtained his B.S. in electrical engineering from NIT Rourkela, India, his M.S. in computer science from New Jersey Institute of Technology, and his M. Phil. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Columbia University, New York. He is currently lead member of technical staff at AT&T’s Security and Mobility Organization within the Chief Security Office, where he leads the design and architecture of security for next generation mobility networks. His 25-year career includes CTO of Wireless at a cybersecurity company, NIKSUN, senior scientist at Telcordia Applied Research, director of the Central Research Facility at Columbia University, and computer engineer at TATA Motors. He has more than 80 conference and journal publications, three book chapters, and 28 issued patents; he has given tutorials in mobility management at various conferences. His research interests include wireless Internet, multimedia signaling, mobility management, 4G networks, IMS, VoIP, and session control protocols. He is co-author of the book Mobility Protocols and Handover Optimization: Design, Evaluation and Application (Wiley). He serves as Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Cybersecurity and Mobility (River Publishers). He is a Senior Member of ACM, and has served as Chair of the IEEE Princeton/Central Jersey Section, Industry Relation Chair for Region 1 and MGA, Pre-University Coordinator for IEEE MGA, and Chair of the Ad

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Hoc Committee for Public Visibility of IEEE ComSoc. As Vice Chair of the Education Society Chapter of PCJS, he co-founded the IEEE STEM Conference in 2011 and helped to implement Engineering Projects in Community Service in the high schools within PCJS. He currently serves as Director of Marketing and Industry Relations for IEEE ComSoc. He was the recipient of the prestigious 2009 IEEE MGA Leadership award and the 2010 IEEE-USA Professional Leadership Award. He currently serves as Vice Chair of the Global ICT Standardization Forum for India’s Service Oriented Networking WG. S UDHIR D IXIT [F] has been a Distinguished Chief Technologist and CTO at Communications and Media Services (Americas), HP Enterprise Services since December 2013, and is based in Palo Alto, Californa. Prior to this he was director of HP Labs India since September 2009. From June to August 2009, he was a director at HP Labs. Prior to joining HP Labs, he held a joint appointment as CTO at the Centre for Internet Excellence and a research manager at the Centre for Wireless Communications, Oulu, Finland. From 1996 to 2008, he held various positions with leading companies, such as BlackBerry as a senior director, Nokia and Nokia Networks in the United States as senior research manager, Nokia Research Fellow, head of Nokia Research Center (Boston, Massachusetts), and head of Network Technology (USA). From 1987 to 1996, he was at NYNEX Science and Technology and GTE Laboratories (both now Verizon Communications). He has 21 U.S. patents granted, has published over 200 papers, and edited, co-edited, or authored six books: Wi-Fi, WiMAX and LTE Multi-hop Mesh Networks (Wiley, 2013), Globalization of Mobile and Wireless Communications (Springer, 2011), Technologies for Home Networking (Wiley, 2008), Content Networking in the Mobile Internet (Wiley, 2004), IP over WDM (Wiley, 2003), and Wireless IP and Building the Mobile Internet (Artech House, 2002). He is presently on the Editorial Boards of IEEE Spectrum, Cambridge University Press Wireless Series, and Springer’s Wireless Personal Communications Journal and the Central European Journal of Computer Science. He is Chairman of the Vision Committee and Vice Chair for the Americas at the Wireless World Research Forum. From 2010 to 2012, he was an adjunct professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis, and has been a docent (adjunct professor) of broadband mobile communications for emerging economies at the University of Oulu, Finland. A Fellow of IET and IETE, he received a Ph.D. degree in electronic science and telecommunications from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, United Kingdom, and an M.B.A. from the Florida Institute of Technology, Mel, Florida. He received his M.E. (electronics) degree from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India, and his B.E. (electrical engineering) from Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology, Bhopal, India. RAMJEE PRASAD [F] is currently director of the Center for TeleInFrastruktur (CTIF) at Aalborg University, Denmark, and Wireless Information Multimedia Communication Chair Professor. He is the Founding Chair of the Global ICT Standardisation Forum for India (www.gisfi.org) established in 2009. GISFI has the purpose of increasing the collaboration between European, Indian, Japanese, North American, and other worldwide standardization activities in ICT and related application areas. He was Founding Chair of the HERMES Partnership, a network of leading independent European research centers established in 1997, of which he is now Honorary Chair. He is a Fellow of IETE, India, IET, United Kingdom, WirelessWorld Research Forum, and a member of the Netherlands Electronics and Radio Society and the Danish Engineering Society. He is also a Knight (“Ridder”) of the Order of Dannebrog (2010), a distinguished award by the Queen of Denmark. He has received several international awards, the latest being the 2014 IEEE AESS Outstanding Organizational Leadership Award for “organizational leadership in developing and globalizing the Center for TeleInFrastruktur Research Network.” He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Springer International Journal on Wireless Personal Communications. He is a member of the Editorial Board of other renowned international journals including those of River Publishers. He is a member of the Steering Committees of many renowned annual international conferences, such as Wireless Personal Multimedia Communications Symposium, Wireless VITAE, and Global Wireless Summit. He has published more than 30 books, over 900 journal and conference publications, and more than 15 patents, and has mentored more than 90 Ph.D. students and over 200 Master’s students. Several of his students are now telecommunication leaders worldwide.
