C3PO

Social networks put together individuals with common interests and/or existing real-life relationships so that they can produce and share information. There is a strong interest of individuals towards those networks. They rely on a stable, centralized network infrastructure and a user will always be provided with the same services no matter of its current context. By contrast, our C3PO project wants to promote “spontaneous and ephemeral social networks” (SESN) that build on top of a peer-to-peer distributed architecture leveraging ad-hoc mobile networks and the resources and services offered by mobile devices. As with traditional social networks, SESN can put together nomad individuals based on their affinities and common interests so that they can collaboratively work on tasks as part of a SESN. In C3PO, we strive for incitation in collaborating through a SESN. Several application domains have been anticipated for SESN, especially those involving gathering information and producing content as part of cultural or sport events. In such types of SESN, photo sharing, collaborative document edition and sport results spreading services can be used for building structured digital contents that relate the events of a sports event. Generated contents can be consulted through the several production sources. They can then be replicated on dedicated servers or published to traditional, centralized social networks and made available to Internet users beyond the lifespan of the SESN where they were initially produced. The C3PO project aims at investigating the problems posed by SESN, and especially those induced by the dynamic and unreliable nature of the ad-hoc mobile networks. It will offer innovative scientific and software solutions for services provision with intermittent connectivity, the definition of an infrastructure for the collaborative management of services in the context of SESN, and an analysis of the value adapted to this context. C3PO is a 3 years industrial research project involving 4 academic research groups and an industrial partner. The proposed contributions will be validated by experimentation in real-world conditions.