Special Issue on: Interdisciplinary and cross-layer design of mobile social networks and wireless networks

Social networks have attracted billions of active users under major online social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, DouBan, etc. These social networks not only serve as information stores to provide invaluable social information on users' relationships and hobbies but also serve as a strong enabler for e-health and mobile social caring services to improve people's quality of life and to promote social inclusion. Equipped with the advancement and ubiquity of wireless networks and the increasingly high capability of smart mobile handsets, this critical mass of social network users is naturally going mobile thus rendering a new research field of mobile social networks (MSNs). In comparison with the fixed social networks, such mobile social networks enable constant and instantaneous connections with social contacts. The marriage of current wired-network-based social networks with mobile wireless networks triggers exciting new research areas. For instance, measuring the network features such as throughput and delay can help mobile social networks select a contact (e.g. a job advice centre) to which the network route has the best performance. This leads to the so-called wireless-aware social networks and the problem domain is within social networks. On the other hand, there is also social-aware or social inspired wireless network research where the knowledge of social network users is exploited for the benefit of wireless network design. Therefore, a cross-layer design that incorporates both the upper-layer mobile social networks and the lower-layer wireless networks is needed. And this comprises the thematic essence of this Special Issue.