ABSTRACT
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10.1 Introduction Mobile Social Network (MSN), as one of the promising social networking platforms, have become progressively popular and brought numerous benefits in various fields due to the portability and pervasiveness of smartphones [1, 2, 3]. With MSNs, users can discover friends with similar interests or preferences in the local proximity, exchange videos or images, and share traffic, shopping, or health information with others. MSNs are usually designed in the hybrid architecture as shown in Figure 10.1, where users often need to send data to their friends. In MSNs, while some users can directly access online social networks via the Internet or cellular networks, other users may not be able to access the Internet at some time in a mobile environment. If the Internet is not available, opportunistic contacts can be an alternative method to help users to stay connected with their friends. Since mobile devices (smartphones and tablets, etc.) are usually taken by humans, the dynamic and unpredictable human mobility results in the intermittent connectivity and dramatically impacts their communications.
