Towards Social Networking: A Proof-of-Concept Model

The structure of the current Internet does not fully reflect the structure of human relationships in the real world. Human relationships are structured as various community networks, however IP-based network is essentially not structured in terms of information retrieval and sharing. In the communication style on the current network, end node can obtain information and contents from the whole of the network. In social-centric networking, information is likely to be diffused and shared within community network that is related to the topic of the information, members of community network can obtain information related to the community more efficiently and rapidly. We believe that a social-centric networking paradigm would be a fundamental principle of communications in the future. In this paper, we propose a social-centric network architecture that leverages multiple network structures. One of our objectives is elimination of inefficiency on information diffusion due to gaps between the current network structure and the real world human relationships and community structure. We also propose a proof-of-concept model to evaluate efficiency of information diffusion in consideration of workload of node. We then show the improvement of load-balancing and efficiency of information retrieval through the results of mathematical analysis and simulation.