Decentralized Event-Based Vehicular Social Networks and Case Study

Abstract

People often drive cars from all directions to social spots, such as shopping mall, football count,
venue, museum, etc., to participate in some events. The participants constitute a relatively stable
Event-Based Social Network (EBSN), which facilitates communication for a specific period of time
and location. The motivation of the paper is that the users driving to participating in the same event
have the same destination and similar interest, who are likely to share information about the social
spot and interact with each other for entertainment along the route. Thus, the paper proposes a Eventbased
Vehicular Social Network (EBVSN) to facilitate a temporal-spatial communication between
participants in vehicles or pedestrians. The EBVSN is to provide EBSN utilities on VANET even
cellular or WIFI infrastructure may not be reliable. Since users in EBVSN move to the same destination,
the connection between them is relatively stable, and even the closer to the destination, the
denser is the network. Considering information silos among EBVSN and other online social networks
as well as privacy, the EBVSN is designed to be decentralized social network, where multiple
event organizers are distributed in various social spots and provide social utilities and data storage at
individual local servers. The establishment of EBVSN, message dissemination, and data request/response
are conducted by the entities of EBVSN Application, EBVSN Service, EBVSN Client, and
WAVE stack. EBVSN Service at RSU periodically broadcasts an announcement message about the
event and disseminate messages to users on behalf of EBVSN Application, and acts as an intermediary
for data request and response. A use case is also given where the users who are driving to the
football count to watch a game constitute an EBVSN initialization.