Real-time QoS monitoring from the end user perspective in large scale social networks

Social networking (SN) activities account for a major fraction of the time that internet users collectively spend on the web and they represent a valuable source of information and services. The SocIoS project defined an API that enables the aggregation of data and functionality of underlying SN services (SNS) APIs and allows their combination, so to build new application workflows and/or to complement existing ones. While this scheme provides SN users with a tool that has a dramatic potential in terms of productivity, it also introduces a dependency on external SNS, over which the SocIoS API end user has limited control. In this context, the availability of a dependable (i.e., unbiased, reliable, and timely) facility for continuous monitoring of the QoS being actually delivered by external SNS is thus of paramount importance. Such a facility is implemented by the QoS-MONaaS component, a portable architecture developed within the context of the SRT-15 FP7 project.