Performance Analysis of Information Propagation in DTN-like Scale-free Mobile Social Network

Abstract

Mobile social network can be seen as a specific application of the DTN (Delay Tolerant Network), in which the information propagation can be impacted by many social behaviors of the nodes. For a specific node, its social behaviors are various. For example, the node may not be interested in the information before receiving it and may also discard the information after getting it. On the other hand, people are more willing to forward the message to his friends. These interactive behaviors between nodes can be seen as social behaviors. It is easy to see that the impact of the social behaviors is related to the social ties, which can be manifested by the structure of the social network. State of the art works often simply assumes that the social networks can be divided into some communities. At present, some works find that the structure of some social networks is scale-free. To overcome this problem, this paper proposes a theoretical model to evaluate the impact of above social behaviors in the DTN-like scale-free network. Simulation shows the accuracy of the model. Numerical results show that both social behaviors and scale-free character have significant impact on information propagation. Moreover, the impact of social behaviors is related to the scale-free character of the networks.