In this paper we seek to improve our understanding of human mobility in terms of social structures, and to use these structures in the design of forwarding algorithms for Pocket Switched Networks (PSNs). Taking human mobility traces from the real world, we discover that human interaction is heterogeneous both in terms of hubs (popular individuals) and groups or communities. We propose a social based forwarding algorithm, BUBBLE, which is shown empirically to improve the forwarding efficiency significantly compared to oblivious forwarding schemes and to PROPHET algorithm. We also show how this algorithm can be implemented in a distributed way, which demonstrates that it is applicable in the decentralised environment of PSNs.

Community is an important attribute of Pocket Switched Networks (PSN), because mobile devices are carried by people who tend to belong to communities. We analysed community structure from mobility traces and used for forwarding algorithms [12], which shows significant impact of community. Here, we propose and evaluate three novel distributed community detection approaches with great potential to detect both static and temporal communities. We find that with suitable configuration of the threshold values, the distributed community detection can approximate their corresponding centralised methods up to 90% accuracy.

The emergence of Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) has culminated in a new generation of wireless networking. We focus on a type of human-to-human communication in DTNs, where human behaviour exhibits the characteristics of networks by forming a community. We show the characteristics of such networks from extensive study of realworld human connectivity traces. We exploit distributed community detection from the trace and propose a Socio-Aware Overlay over detected communities for publish/subscribe communication. Centrality nodes have the best visibility to the other nodes in the network. We create an overlay with such centrality nodes from communities. Distributed community detection operates when nodes (i.e. devices) are in contact by gossipping, and subscription propagation is performed along with this operation. We validate our message dissemination algorithms for publish/subscribe with connectivity traces.

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Abstract-In modern politics, parties and individual candidates must have an online presence and usually have dedicated social media coordinators. In this context, we study the usefulness of analysing Twitter messages to identify both the characteristics of political parties and the political leaning of users. As a case study, we collected the main stream of Twitter related to the 2010 UK General Election during the associated period -gathering around 1,150,000 messages from about 220,000 users. We examined the characteristics of the three main parties in the election and highlighted the main differences between parties. First, Labour members were the most active and influential during the election while Conservative members were the most organized to promote their activities. Second, the websites and blogs that each political party's members supported are clearly different from those that all the other political parties' members supported. From these observations, we develop a simple and practical classification method which uses the number of Twitter messages referring to a particular political party. The experimental results showed that the proposed classification method achieved about 86% classification accuracy and outperforms other classification methods that require expensive costs for tuning classifier parameters and/or knowledge about network topology.

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