Analyzing the scalability of a social network of agents

Social networks are ever-growing systems by inheritance. The increase in the number nodes in these systems often brings forth the need to add additional functionalities. However due to the distributed nature of social networks, system growth can be a challenging task. Therefore scalability of the system is of vital importance in the design of social networks. This research attempts to establish a comprehensive framework for analysis and validation of requirements and design documents for software systems. In previous work, we applied this framework to analyze the requirements of a social network of agents; expressed using scenario-based specifications. Scenarios are appealing because of their expressive power and simplicity. Moreover due to the clear and concise notation of scenarios, they can be used to analyze the system requirements for general validity, lack of deadlock, and existence of emergent behavior. In this paper a methodology to analyze the scalability of social networks is presented. This methodology is devised to indicate whether or not the new requirements of the system are consistent with the current requirements in place. A larger prototype of a social network of MSA for semantic search is utilized to illustrate the developed methodology.