A mobile social network-based group touring scheme with FEC packet loss recovery

Location-based service (LBS) is a general class of add-on network services using the information on the geographical positions of users. With the significant growth of portable and mobile devices, more and more LBS applications are developed for smart phones or tablet PCs. For example, the touring service is able to provide the neighboring information for tourists. In the past, most touring services only consider how a single user gets the neighboring information from the Internet based on his current geo-location. However, mobile devices are capable of limited battery life and limited wireless access capability. This paper is motivated to design and analyze the feasibility of the group touring service. A mobile social network-based group touring scheme (MSN-GTS) is proposed to let users be able to form a one-hop touring group dynamically. Members who subscribe the 3G/3.5G/4G cellular service would share their connections with other members who have only limited Wi-Fi access capacity. Since a group of users travel together, the proposed MSN-GTS is able to avoid multiple location updating and redundant data downloading. Our experimental results investigate and discuss the performance of MSN-GTS, including power consumption and transmission quality.