Recent Advances in Ad-Hoc Social Networking: Key Techniques and Future Research Directions

Ad-hoc Social Networks are formed by groups of nodes, designating a similarity of interests. The network establishes a two-layer hierarchical structure that comprises communication within-group and joining with other groups. This paper presents survey and future directions in four areas of establishing ad-hoc social network using mobile ad-hoc social network (MANET) that includes architecture or implementation features, Profile Management of users, Similarity Metric, and Routing Protocols. The survey presents the need to provide social applications over MANET, optimizing profile matching algorithms of users, and context aware routing protocols. Future directions include multi-hop social network applications that can be useful for users even in airplane mode and notifying over MANET when a user of profile with similar interest is nearby.