CAMEO: A novel context-aware middleware for opportunistic mobile social networks

Mobile systems are characterized by several dynamic components such as user mobility, device interoperability, and interactions among users and their devices. In this scenario, context-awareness and the emerging concept of social-awareness become a fundamental requirement to develop optimized systems and applications. In this paper we present CAMEO, a light-weight context-aware middleware platform for mobile devices designed to support the development of real-time mobile social network (MSN) applications. MSNs extend the paradigm of online social networks with additional interaction opportunities generated by user mobility and opportunistic wireless communications among users which share interests, habits, and needs. Specifically, CAMEO is designed to collect and reason upon multidimensional context information, derived by the local device, the local user, and their physical interactions with other devices and users. It provides a common application programming interface to MSN applications through which they can exploit context- and social-aware functionalities to optimize their features. CAMEO has been implemented on an Android platform together with a real example of an MSN application. Validation and performance evaluation have been conducted through an experimental testbed.