A Novel Budget-Constrained Rewiring Strategy for Information Flow in Social Networks

In real-world networks, such as social networks, the occurrence of random failures or external attacks on network components can lead to the discontinuation of information flow in the network. Hence, ensuring the existence and robustness of these networks is a crucial concern these days. To address this problem, one possible solution is to redesign the connection between individual nodes in the network using some budget-constrained rewiring operations. Multiple rewiring operations help in building trust between individuals and strengthening their connections, further enhancing overall connectivity and information flow in the network. The effectiveness of rewiring approaches is determined by analyzing some important facts, such as the rewiring cost, adherence to budget constraints, and enhancement in network connectivity. To assess the efficacy of rewiring approaches, the rewiring cost has been regularly updated after each rewiring operation by measuring the evolution of the size of the giant component in the social network. The performance of the proposed budget-constrained rewiring approaches is evaluated against the random rewiring approach. The results show the superiority of the proposed approaches on the benchmark real-world dataset. By leveraging these budget-constrained rewiring approaches, it becomes possible to design social systems that exhibit enhanced stability and reliability of social networks in the face of various disruptions.