Social network analysis techniques for social-oriented mobile communication networks

Abstract

The recent spread of handheld-size communicating devices has created a dramatic change in the communication opportunities. We are now in the situation where electronic communications can instantly happen not only across the world, but anytime and everywhere, and form a mobile social network. However, the study of those new personal, yet public, interactions and their original ubiquitous nature under the light of social network analysis remains an open problem. From all the solutions addressing social structure mining, many are designed for a posteriori analysis of social graphs, and none of them is really suitable for instant and dynamic generation of such structures that, based on social network analysis, would offer an improvement on the organization and robustness of ubiquitous communication between people. After reviewing the relevance of social analysis on those networks, this chapter presents, analyzes and evaluates novel social structure mining techniques devoted to operation on those dynamic mobile social networks.