An ad-hoc social network generation approach
This work addresses the need for quick deployment of distributed social networks in mobile ad-hoc settings, such as conferences, but is incremental as it builds on existing generative programming techniques.
The authors tackled the problem of rapidly deploying ad-hoc social networks for events like conferences by proposing an approach using generative programming to create applications from specifications in a domain-specific language, resulting in the development of SMGenerator, which generated the ConfInfo application for Android devices.
The use of social networks is still confined to infrastructure-based networks such as the Internet. However, many situations (conferences, fairs, etc.) may require the implementation and rapid deployment of an ad-hoc application for disseminating information: we call this type of application, Ad-hoc Social Network. These applications are necessarily distributed, deployable on mobile units, etc. They therefore inevitably share the same characteristics as those inherent in ad-hoc mobile networks and make them good candidates for their deployment. In this paper, by using techniques from the field of generative programming, we propose an approach to produce environments for generating such applications from their specifications in a domain-specific language. By applying this approach, we have developed SMGenerator, an environment for generating mobile ad-hoc social network applications for Android devices. Moreover by using SMGenerator, we easily generated the ConfInfo application: an ad-hoc social network application for disseminating information to participants in a scientific manifestation.