Feel Bored? Join Verse! Engineering Vehicular Proximity Social Networks

Travelers in vehicles often have a strong willingness to share their travel experience and exchange information to each other through social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter. This, however, can be costly due to the limited connections on the road to the Internet. In this paper, we develop Verse to facilitate the social communications among vehicle travelers on highways. Verse enables passengers onboard vehicles to share the content information, such as travel blogs with pictures, among each other using impromptu wireless intervehicle communications. Unlike traditional online social networks, which are built upon reliable internet protocol (IP) networks, vehicular social networks face fundamental challenges in that 1) users are anonymous and strangers to each other and that it is hard to identify potential friends of shared interests and that 2) users communicate through intermittent and unreliable intervehicle connections. On addressing the two challenges, Verse implements a friend recommendation function, which helps passengers efficiently identify potential social friends with both shared interests and relatively reliable wireless connections. In addition, Verse is equipped with a social-aware rate control scheme toward efficient utilization of network bandwidth. Using extensive simulations, we show that the friend recommendation function of Verse can effectively predict the mobility of vehicles to assist in social communication and that the social-aware rate control scheme quickly and efficiently adapts to the vehicle's transmission rate according to their social impact.