A Research Platform for Real-World Evaluation of Routing Schemes in Delay Tolerant Social Networks

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 demo, we showcase AlleyOop Social, a secure delay tolerant networking research platform that serves as a real-life mobile social networking application for iOS devices. AlleyOop Social allows 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. The research platform serves as an overlay application for the Secure Opportunistic Schemes (SOS) middleware which allows different routing schemes to be easily implemented relieving the burden of security and connection establishment.