Rayzit: An Anonymous and Dynamic Crowd Messaging Architecture

Abstract

The smartphone revolution has introduced a new era of social networks where users communicate over anonymous messaging platforms to exchange opinions, ideas and even carry out commerce. These platforms enable individuals to establish social interactions between strangers based on a common interest or attribute. In this paper we present Rayzit1, a novel anonymous crowd messaging architecture, which utilizes the location of each user to connect them instantly to their k Nearest Neighbors (kNN) as they move in space. Contrary to the very large body of location-based social networks that suffer from bootstrapping issues, our architecture enables a user to always interact with the geographically closest possible users around. We establish this communication using a fast computation of an All kNN query that generates a dynamic global social graph every few seconds. We present motivating application scenarios and the detailed back-end architecture that allows Rayzit to scale. We have collected and analyzed data from the interactions of thousands of active users and confirm our claims. © 2015 IEEE.