Abstract-There are many contexts in distributed wireless networks where there is a critical threshold, corresponding to a minimum amount of the communication effort or power expenditure by individual nodes, above which a desirable global property exists with high probability. When this individual node effort is below the threshold the desired global property exists with a low probability. This "phase transition" is typically seen to become sharper as the number of nodes in the network increases. We discuss in this paper some examples of properties that exhibit such critical behavior: node reachability with probabilistic flooding, ad-hoc network connectivity, and sensor network coordination. We discuss the connections between these phenomena and the phase transitions that have been shown to arise in random graphs. We argue that a good understanding of these phase transition phenomena can provide useful design principles for engineering distributed wireless networks.
Twitter has become a widely used social network to discuss ideas about many domains. This leads to a growing interest in understanding what are the major accepted or rejected opinions in different domains by social network users. At the same time, checking what are the topics that produce the most controversial discussions among users can be a good tool to discover topics that can be divisive, what can be useful, e.g., for policy makers. With the aim to automatically discover such information from Twitter discussions, we present an analysis system based on Valued Abstract Argumentation to model and reason about the accepted and rejected opinions. We consider different schemes to weight the opinions of Twitter users, such that we can tune the relevance of opinions considering different information sources from the social network. Towards having a fully automatic system, we also design a relation labeling system for discovering the relation between opinions. Regarding the underlying acceptability semantics, we use ideal semantics to compute accepted/rejected opinions. We define two measures over sets of accepted and rejected opinions to quantify the most controversial discussions. In order to validate our system, we analyze different real Twitter discussions from the political domain. The results show that different weighting schemes produce different sets of socially accepted opinions and that the controversy measures can reveal significant differences between discussions.
We present experimental and analytical results showing "zero-one" phase transitions for network connectivity, multi-path reliability, neighbor count, Hamiltonian cycle formation, multiple-clique formation, and probabilistic flooding. These transitions are characterized by critical density thresholds such that a global property exists with negligible probability on one side of the threshold, and exists with high probability on the other. We discuss the connections between these phase transitions and some known results on random graphs, and indicate their significance for the design of resource-efficient wireless networks.
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