Modeling User Interactions in Social Communication Networks with Variable Social Vector Clocks

Social communication networks have been widely investigated in recent years. From fine-grained temporal information's point of view, social vector clock (SVC) is a useful mechanism to track the most recent communication with all other local peers in a social network. A modification of conventional social vector clocks has been proposed to deal with the issue of poor scalability without keeping whole temporal views [1]. In this paper, we propose an idea of variable social vector clocks (VSVCs) and the corresponding incremental algorithm. Not only does it maintain the lower bound of how out-of-date each peer can be with respect to others, but it also considers the shortest friendship separation to restrict how far information may be transmitted along time respecting paths. Unless this separation is bounded to be infinite, some communication messages could be lost implicitly. We also focus on studying message inconsistency and reachable in-degree communication distribution in several social networks based on variable social vector clocks.