A survey on Human Mobility and its applications

Human Mobility has attracted attentions from different fields of studies such as epidemic modeling, traffic engineering, traffic prediction and urban planning. In this survey we review major characteristics of human mobility studies including from trajectory-based studies to studies using graph and network theory. In trajectory-based studies statistical measures such as jump length distribution and radius of gyration are analyzed in order to investigate how people move in their daily life, and if it is possible to model this individual movements and make prediction based on them. Using graph in mobility studies, helps to investigate the dynamic behavior of the system, such as diffusion and flow in the network and makes it easier to estimate how much one part of the network influences another by using metrics like centrality measures. We aim to study population flow in transportation networks using mobility data to derive models and patterns, and to develop new applications in predicting phenomena such as congestion. Human Mobility studies with the new generation of mobility data provided by cellular phone networks, arise new challenges such as data storing, data representation, data analysis and computation complexity. A comparative review of different data types used in current tools and applications of Human Mobility studies leads us to new approaches for dealing with mentioned challenges

Exploiting Temporal Complex Network Metrics in Mobile Malware Containment

Malicious mobile phone worms spread between devices via short-range Bluetooth contacts, similar to the propagation of human and other biological viruses. Recent work has employed models from epidemiology and complex networks to analyse the spread of malware and the effect of patching specific nodes. These approaches have adopted a static view of the mobile networks, i.e., by aggregating all the edges that appear over time, which leads to an approximate representation of the real interactions: instead, these networks are inherently dynamic and the edge appearance and disappearance is highly influenced by the ordering of the human contacts, something which is not captured at all by existing complex network measures. In this paper we first study how the blocking of malware propagation through immunisation of key nodes (even if carefully chosen through static or temporal betweenness centrality metrics) is ineffective: this is due to the richness of alternative paths in these networks. Then we introduce a time-aware containment strategy that spreads a patch message starting from nodes with high temporal closeness centrality and show its effectiveness using three real-world datasets. Temporal closeness allows the identification of nodes able to reach most nodes quickly: we show that this scheme can reduce the cellular network resource consumption and associated costs, achieving, at the same time, a complete containment of the malware in a limited amount of time.Comment: 9 Pages, 13 Figures, In Proceedings of IEEE 12th International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks (WOWMOM '11

A Survey of Social Network Analysis Techniques and their Applications to Socially Aware Networking

Socially aware networking is an emerging research field that aims to improve the current networking technologies and realize novel network services by applying social network analysis (SNA) techniques. Conducting socially aware networking studies requires knowledge of both SNA and communication networking, but it is not easy for communication networking researchers who are unfamiliar with SNA to obtain comprehensive knowledge of SNA due to its interdisciplinary nature. This paper therefore aims to fill the knowledge gap for networking researchers who are interested in socially aware networking but are not familiar with SNA. This paper surveys three types of important SNA techniques for socially aware networking: identification of influential nodes, link prediction, and community detection. Then, this paper introduces how SNA techniques are used in socially aware networking and discusses research trends in socially aware networking

Understanding information centric layer of adaptive collaborative caching framework in mobile disconnection-prone networks

Smart networks and services leverage in-network caching to improve transmission efficiency and support large amount of content sharing, decrease high operating costs and handle disconnections. In this paper, we investigate the complex challenges related to content popularity weighting process in collaborative caching algorithm in heterogeneous mobile disconnection prone environments. We describe a reputation-based popularity weighting mechanism built in information-centric layer of our adaptive collaborative caching framework CafRepCache which considers a realistic case where caching points gathering content popularity observed by nodes differentiates between them according to node's reputation and network's connectivity. We extensively evaluate CafRepCache with competitive protocols across three heterogeneous real-world mobility, connectivity traces and use YouTube dataset for different workload and content popularity patterns. We show that our collaborative caching mechanism CafRepCache balances the trade-off that achieves higher cache hit ratio, efficiency and success ratios while keeping lower delays, packet loss and caching footprint compared to competing protocols across three traces in the face of dynamic mobility of publishers and subscribers