Mobile social networks [guest editorial]

Activities associated with social networks have contributed a significant fraction of Internet traffic in the form of instant messages, shared videos and images, interactive blogs, and so on. With the rapid rise in the use of smartphones and similar devices, such Internet traffic is increasingly in support of mobile social networking. This situation has spurred considerable recent research interest in mobile social networks. Social networks have been studied for decades, although most of the earlier work in this area addressed issues lying outside the scope of technological networks. More recently, social network models that treat relationships as connections to form networks or graphs have emerged in mobile Internet and mobile computing/communications as the foundations of cloud-based applications and services. However, there are still significant technological challenges in the development of the cloud infrastructure and mobile terminal devices, and the purpose of this Feature Topic is to highlight recent advances along this technology trend.