A Survey of Mobile Social Networks: Applications, Social Characteristics, and Challenges

With the popularity of mobile devices and the development of the wireless technologies, humans can be connected ubiquitously. Because of the mobility of the devices, it is a hard task to maintain the end-to-end path between source node and destination node. Researchers have introduced analysis of nodes' social behavior to solve the problem of data dissemination in the networks, which leads to the emersion of the Mobile Social Networks (MSNs). They increase the performance of data forwarding by the social relationships and interactions among nodes. Many schemes and algorithms have been proposed to enhance data forwarding performance and provide humanized service by introducing social features and digging social properties. In this paper, first, we investigate the architectures and evolutionary process of the MSNs. Then, the social features of nodes existing in the MSNs and main social properties of MSNs are described. In term of the state-of-the-art works, data forwarding strategies in the MSNs are divided into four categories, including only encounter history-based strategies, social-based strategies, incentive mechanisms, and forwarding methods that take social selfishness into consideration of this paper. Finally, the major issues and challenges are discussed.