Challenges of MANET for Mobile Social Networks

In the last years mobile networking via smart phones and mobile telephones is widely realized as an infrastructure based networking. The provider grants an affordable and stable access to the Internet, which can be used by applications in the same way as it is used on stationary computers. However, many mobile devices support a variety of communication interfaces that are suitable for ad-hoc communication. For example, WIFI and Bluetooth can be used for ad-hoc networking. One reason, why these networking devices are rarely used in ad-hoc mode by mobile applications, is that limitations in the reliability of network access have to be considered as long as they have to provide more than 1-to-1 communication. This contribution points out, that despite all technical issues the consideration of social aspects and commercial aspects is a major point for any success off MANET technology for mobile applications. We discuss a message centric approach to ad-hoc networking, which relies on simple store and forward mechanism to spread data asynchronously in the network. This technique can be used for specific applications only, which depends on tailored value-chain setups to be spread in the market. We also point out the application specific constraints that go along in with the abduction of infrastructure-based networking