Research Article
Profile-BasedAdHocSocialNetworkingUsingWi-Fi
DirectontheTopofAndroid
NagenderAneja andSapnaGambhir
YMCA University of Science and Technology, Faridabad, India
Correspondence should be addressed to Nagender Aneja; naneja@gmail.com
Received 1 July 2018; Accepted 16 September 2018; Published 17 October 2018
Guest Editor: Subramaniam Ganesan
Copyright © 2018 Nagender Aneja and Sapna Gambhir. is is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons
Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is
properly cited.
Ad hoc social networks have become popular to support novel applications related to location-based mobile services that are of
great importance to users and businesses. Unlike traditional social services using a centralized server to fetch location, ad hoc
social network services support infrastructure-less real-time social networking. It allows users to collaborate and share views
anytime anywhere. However, current ad hoc social network applications either are not available without rooting the mobile
phones or do not filter the nearby users based on common interests without a centralized server. is paper presents an ar-
chitecture and implementation of social networks on commercially available mobile devices that allow broadcasting name and
a limited number of keywords representing users’ interests without any connection in a nearby region to facilitate matching of
interests. e broadcasting region creates a digital aura and is limited by the Wi-Fi region that is around 200 meters. e
application connects users to form a group based on their profile or interests using the peer-to-peer communication mode without
using any centralized networking or profile-matching infrastructure. e peer-to-peer group can be used for private com-
munication when the network is not available.
1.Introduction
Online social networks, for example, Facebook, LinkedIn, or
Twitter, are now highly popular among people, and the trend
to use the social networking applications on the mobile
device is continuously increasing. e pattern of using social
networking on the mobile device is being exploited by re-
searchers and service providers to provide location-based
social networking [1–3]. Examples of location-based social
networking include the Facebook’s feature to find exotic
locations or friends nearby in a geographical region. How-
ever, current social networking applications do not provide
location-based services without accessing the present site
of a user, and many users consider this a privacy risk. Fur-
thermore, limited data plans for the mobile device and high
cost of international roaming constraint users to commu-
nicate even in the nearby region. us, the current trend is to
decentralize the online social network [4].
Ad hoc social network, one-to-one or multipeer con-
nection, can solve this problem of privacy and help facilitate
the communication in a nearby region without using the
centralized infrastructure. ere are numerous applications;
for example, it may also be useful in a business meeting
where the distribution of physical business cards is not
a convenient method, but the e-cards can be conveniently
distributed in a peer-to-peer network to all individuals
present nearby. Another application is communication
among passengers in an airplane for game playing by
children especially when the flight duration is long or for
anonymous chatting among interested passengers or with
crew members. Furthermore, ad hoc social network can help
to communicate in case of natural disasters or government
censorship.
Ad hoc wireless peer-to-peer technology connects de-
vices to create a communication group for social interaction.
is paper presents a Wi-Fi peer-to-peer-based mechanism
called OffAT (OFFline chAT) [5] that helps to find people
with similar interests in a nearby region [1, 6, 7] and allows
sharing text or handwritten messages without any central-
ized server. e mechanism can be used to further develop
Hindawi
Mobile Information Systems
Volume 2018, Article ID 9469536, 7 pages
https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/9469536