Home // International Journal On Advances in Networks and Services, volume 4, numbers 1 and 2, 2011 // View article

The Analysis of Similarities and Registration Delay in Phonebook Centric Social Networks

Authors:
Péter Ekler
Tamás Lukovszki

Keywords: social networks, mobile phones, power law distribution, variance, central limit theorem, queue model

Abstract:
Phonebook centric social networks provide a synchronization mechanism between phonebooks of the users and the social network which allows detecting other users listed in the phonebooks. After that, if one of their contacts changes her or his personal detail, it will be propagated automatically into the phonebooks, after considering privacy settings. We participated in the implementation of a phonebook centric social network, called Phonebookmark and investigated the structure of the network. We used the data of this network for building the proposed models. In such social networks two entities may identify the same person if some parameters are similar, e.g.: phone number, address, etc. We call such entity pairs as similarities. Previously it was shown that the distribution of similarities follows a power law. Also a model was proposed by us, which can be used to estimate the total number of similarities, which is very important from scalability point of view in such networks. However the accuracy of the model is another question, because of the infinite variance of the power law distribution, which is used for modeling the number of similarities involving a user. The paper presents interesting and practical problem of analysis of similarities in social networks with application to mobile phonebooks management. The presented contribution includes both theoretical and practical components as well. We show that using the fact that a member of the network can only be involved in a limited number of similarities results in a similarity distribution with a finite variance. By using the central limit theorem we show the accuracy of our estimation. We also highlight that this model can be used in other power law distributions which apply to the requirements. Finally we also propose a performance model which can be used during the resource requirement design of such phonebook centric social networks.

Pages: 199 to 208

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2011. Used with permission.

Publication date: September 15, 2011

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2644