Managing the Formation and Interaction of Groups within Emerging Social Networks

The formation, evolution and management of groups within modern social networks pose significant challenges and opportunities. Challenges arise from a combination of ubiquitous connectivity coupled with innovative and inexpensive cloud infrastructure, yielding new usage patterns which push existing service architectures, management infrastructure and technology stacks to their limits. Opportunities for remedying this situation arise from re-thinking the formation and management of social media groups and introducing innovative models, notations, algorithms and implementation strategies. To this end, this work analyses emerging group formation and interaction patterns, applies new approaches to current prominent protocols and evaluates resultant behavior and performance characteristics. This analysis is applied to more sophisticated usage patterns; models, notations and algorithms are devised to exibly support emerging scenarios, and specific implementations are discussed and analysed. Applying Policy Based Network Management principles to manage the formation of, and interaction within, groups is demonstrated to be viable, particularly if coupled with emerging technology stacks. An innovative architecture model is evolved, which can exibly match the performance and scalability requirements likely to emerge in next generation social network platforms. In addition, an approach to policy language development is proposed and demonstrated, capitalising on recent innovations in scripting language design and implementation. This is shown to deliver a considerably simplified, more exible and more expressive alternative to current policy languages, and offers significant scope for further research and innovation.