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The advancement and wide deployment of wireless communication technologies have revolutionized our lifestyles by providing the best ever convenience and flexibility in accessing Internet services and various types of personal communication applications. Today, everyone on the Internet knows the buzzword “social networking” (Lu, 2012). Social networking once began in the online space such as Facebook, Myspace, Youtube, Flickr with hundred millions of users. This online social networking can also be useful in cases such as conferences, exhibitions, meetings, stages, galleries where people want to meet and receive the latest news stories, share experiences with other people, etc. However, the social networking service quickly spread to mobile platforms where people carry their interesting multimedia content in powerful personal devices such as laptops, Smartphone, PDA and want to share with their friends or find people who have similar interests (Ferrag et al., 2013a). Social networking on mobile equipment can be classified in two categories depending on architecture: with infrastructure such as (Bender, 2009; Guha, 2008; Yeung, 2009) and without infrastructure such as (Emre, 2009; Ferrag, 2012b, 2013a; Lee and Hong, 2011; Li, 2013; Sanguankotchakorn, 2012). In our work, we are interested in social networks in an environment without infrastructure (IETF MANET group).
A number of challenging problems are introduced when trying to design and implement distributed social network applications operating within a networked embedded system. When developing social applications, designers do not have to explicitly deal with problems related to distribution, such as security, privacy, heterogeneity, scalability, resource sharing and fault tolerance. On the one hand, nowadays, security is a major challenge in computer science and embedded wireless networks is one of the hot topics due to their specificities: relatively easy access to the network nodes, open communication media. On the other hand, since the social characteristics (human mobility, selfish status, and preferences) are considered in the study of distributed social network applications become more promising and richer than that in the pure distributed network applications. As a result, we are motivated in this special issue which focuses on networked embedded systems to study the social characteristics and their impacts on distributed network applications, and address the challenging security and privacy issues related to them.