Analysis on Evolution and Topological Features of a Real Mobile Social Network

Abstract

With the development of mobile devices, especially the emergence of smart phones, the mobile social networks (MSNs) have emerged to provide a variety of mechanisms for users to share their content. However, because the number of the mobile users still keeps growing rapidly, the MSNs become more complex than before and the features including evolution and topology need to be studied for communication system optimization. Therefore, in this paper, a great deal of data on social interactions among mobile users are collected to reveal the evolution and topological features of the MSNs. Firstly, the evolution feature of the MSN with the time is detailedly studied. Then, the statistical features of MSN including degree distribution, node distance, node closeness, and betweenness are analyzed. From the results of the analysis on the evolution features, we find that the MSN will become complex over time. In addition, the analysis of the topological properties shows that the MSN is a typical scale-free network and has strong small-world features.