Cyber physical systems for Mobile Opportunistic Networking in Proximity (MNP)
h 1 The pervasive presence of mobile personal devices like smarthones, tablets, and similar smart devices, together with the masive use of online social networking services (e.g. Facebook, Twiter, Google Plus, LinkedIn, etc. are increasingly creating a cyberhysical space where users can interact exploiting and generatng information. Enriched with several sensing capabilities and etworking interfaces, today's portable devices are enabling new ays of communication including Mobile Networking in Proximity MNP) [1] This network mode complements the classic scenario ith Internet coverage by enlarging the range of functionalities f these devices through short range communications (e.g. Blueooth, Wi Fi Direct, etc. Even with the wide coverage of the Interet, there are still some situations where the traditional network is verloaded, unavailable, or too expensive. In such situations, when wo devices are in proximity, they could still share information by ust exploiting the meeting opportunities and activating an opporunistic hop by hop forwarding towards the destination. Due to the dynamic and intermittent nature of encounters beween mobile devices, MNP needs to operate under a specific netork paradigm to manage the sparse topologies often created by hese devices. Specifically, a store carry forward mechanism is used, hich allows mobile nodes to store messages, carry them while oving, and forward those messages to other suitable nodes (nextop or destination nodes) when encounter opportunities arise. Reent studies have shown that a social based logic is the most romising choice for selecting the intermediate nodes to which orward a packet during an encounter [2] The basic idea is that xploring human behavior, the meeting patterns between mobile odes can be predicted with a certain accuracy thus maximizing he chances of delivering a message to its destination. In this view, ocial inspired mobile networking research is increasingly underining the benefits and the need of having knowledge of the social ehavior of users for the MNP based design. On one hand, the soial behavior of mobile nodes can be extracted from the mobility f nodes. On the other hand, also online social network interacions may provide information about user's social behavior [3] As uch, the convergence between these two worlds, the physical ofine one made by mobile devices and the cyber online one made y the online social networks is becoming increasingly important, pening a novel and interesting research field with many challengng issues. The purpose of this special issue is to depict the current statef the art of the research closely related to mobile and social netorking, and in particular, to cyber physical MNP, by reporting adP
Comput. Networks