Identifying Connectors and Communities: Understanding Their Impacts on the Performance of a DTN Publish/Subscribe System

Mobile devices carried by people are dynamically networked. Understanding the social structures within the human mobility traces captured from the mobile devices help us design efficient message dissemination schemes. Furthermore, community is an important attribute of future human contact-based networks. People who are in multiple communities are good message carriers. Thus, a distributed community detection scheme that can identify different communities efficiently from the various communication traces e.g. users' emails, human mobility traces is very useful. In this paper, we first identify nodes that can play key roles from some real-world human mobility and email traces using the traditional social network metrics. Then, we investigate the usefulness of several community extraction schemes that can handle both email and contact traces. Last but not least, we demonstrate how the connector identification helps to improve the performance of a DTN publish/subscribe system.