Finding overlapping communities in a complex network of social linkages and Internet of things

  • Authors:
  • Romil Barthwal;Sudip Misra;Mohammad S. Obaidat

  • Affiliations:
  • School of Information Technology, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, India 721302;School of Information Technology, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, India 721302;Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Monmouth University, West Long Branch, USA 07764

  • Venue:
  • The Journal of Supercomputing
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Online social networks play an important role in today's Internet. These social networks contain huge amounts of data and the integrated framework of SN with Internet of things (IoT) presents a challenging problem. IoT is the ubiquitous interconnection of everyday items of interest (things), providing connectivity anytime, anywhere, and with anything. Like biological, co-authorship, and virus-spread networks, IoT and Social Network (SN) can be characterized to be complex networks containing substantial useful information. In the past few years, community detection in graphs has been an active area of research (Lee and Won in Proceedings of IEEE SoutheastCon, pp. 1---5, 2012). Many graph mining algorithms have been proposed, but none of them can help in capturing an important dimension of SNs, which is friendship. A friend circle expands with the help of mutual friends, and, thus, mutual friends play an important role in social networks' growth. We propose two graph clustering algorithms: one for undirected graphs such as Facebook and Google+, and the other for directed graphs such as Twitter. The algorithms extract communities, and based on the access control policy nodes share resources (things). In the proposed Community Detection in Integrated IoT and SN (CDIISN) algorithm, we divide the nodes/actors of complex networks into basic, and IoT nodes. We, then, execute the community detection algorithm on them. We take nodes of a graph as members of a SN, and edges depicting the relations between the nodes. The CDIISN algorithm is purely deterministic, and no fuzzy communities are formed. It is known that one community detection algorithm is not suitable for all types of networks. For different network structures, different algorithms exhibit different results, and methods of execution. However, in our proposed method, the community detection algorithm can be modified as desired by a user based on the network connections. The proposed community detection approach is unique in the sense that a user can define his community detection criteria based on the kind of network.