IEEE Communications Magazine • June 2012 82 0163-6804/12/$25.00 © 2012 IEEE 1 Google “Search, plus Your World” page: http://www.google.com/ins idesearch/plus.html INTRODUCTION Recent advances in smart devices, social com- puting applications, and wireless communica- tions are enabling new service integration and management opportunities. New devices and mobile platforms already permit to accurately trace world-related information and user (physi- cal) activities; physical world perspective (con- nected to Internet of Things) is relatively new if compared to the typical Internet computing information, pure data, pages, and sites. Internet has also evolved and promoted several revolu- tions in usage starting with Web2.0 and more, in the sense of more direct participation and social involvement, see the new Google “Search, plus your world,” 1 with intrinsic integration of user social environment. At the same time, the recent convergence of the worlds of Internet, broad- casting, and mobile communications represents the glue that brings together the computing and the physical world, including people, social inter- actions, and (mobile) services. What is still miss- ing is a general support platform able to truly enrich the whole mobile service management cycle to fully exploit the power of the collective (though imprecise) socio-technical monitoring information deposit to enhance service delivery from both social (recommendation of services of interest) and technical (resource and data deliv- ery optimization) points of view so to improve the Quality of Experience (QoE) for final users. With the main goals of openness and interop- erability via an application-layer approach, IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), based on the Ses- sion Initiation Protocol (SIP), has recently gained success as the session control protocol for application delivery over all-IP next generation networks. IMS specifies a simple and powerful service delivery platform and service composing model, and defines the Service Capabilities Interaction Management (SCIM) component to manage integration and composition of IMS ser- vice blocks [1]. At its current stage, however, IMS still exhibits limitations in the support of integrated monitoring and service composition/recommendation management. On the one hand, the possibility to automatically maintain lists of more useful and widely used mobile services build around user needs, social behaviors, and current activities is still widely unexplored in IMS. On the other hand, SCIM is still a raw composer component without much intelligence: in other words, SCIM is unable to dynamically exploit socio-technical monitoring information about people, service, and network usage to dynamically (re-)adapt the delivery of (composed) mobile multimedia services. The article addresses all above issues by ABSTRACT The ever-increasing people demand for mobile communications has widely been satisfied by novel socially-enabled services and communi- cation styles, starting from the advent of instant messaging to Voice over IP (VoIP), from Web 2.0 to social networks, and beyond. Most people agree that now the new challenge is to explore the potential of that immense information and service deposit already collected, ever-increasing, and easy-to-access to promote a socially-aware recommendation and to foster a more efficient delivery of mobile services. The article addresses the above issues, still unexplored in literature, by focusing on integration problems and describing a practical design experience derived from the development of a socio-technical aware support for the management of mobile services based on the widely diffused and interoperable IP Multi- media Subsystem (IMS) session control plat- form. Our proposal is organized along three main original technical guidelines: an innovative support to monitor and describe via social, phys- ical, and computation information the socio- technical context where services and user interact; a recommendation system to automate and facilitate dynamic selection of the mobile services most suitable from both final user and operator perspectives; and a new IMS-based management platform to ease the composition of existing IMS mobile services and the monitor- ing and control of their usage at runtime. We believe that we contribute with a first step to the understanding of how full awareness of socio and technical information allows improving over- all Quality of Experience (QoE) for the final users. SOCIAL NETWORKS MEET MOBILE NETWORKS Giuseppe Cardone, Antonio Corradi, Luca Foschini, and Rebecca Montanari, University of Bologna Socio-Technical Awareness to Support Recommendation and Efficient Delivery of IMS-Enabled Mobile Services