Distributed influential node detection protocol for mobile social networks

Abstract

© Springer International Publishing AG 2017. Mobile social networks enable users to share their common favorites as they are connected together using their mobile devices. These social networks are deployed on set of different network technologies like MANETs. Mobile social network success depends on the number of its users and their activities. However, this network may contain a large number of connected users, only a few numbers of them can be detected as influential users. The influential user is a user that has a significant effect or influence on other users. In this paper, a proposed protocol that runs fully distributed and can efficiently detect the influential users in mobile social networks. Mostly, the literature provides protocols that use centralized data processing to detect these users based on either friend relations or social-network graphs of all users. But, these approaches are resource exhausting and not scalable. To the best of our knowledge and according to the literature, the protocol can precisely detect influential users or nodes in a mobile social network. Results of the protocol performance analysis has been investigated and presented with a set of significant and promising contributions.