Transient community detection and its application to data forwarding in delay tolerant networks

Community has received considerable attention because of its application to many practical problems in mobile networks. However, when considering temporal information associated with community (i.e., transient community), most existing community detection methods fail due to their aggregation of the contact information into a single weighted or unweighted network. In this paper, we propose a contact-burst-based clustering method to detect transient communities by exploiting the pairwise contact processes. In this method, we formulate each pairwise contact process as regular appearance of contact bursts, during which most contacts between the pair of nodes happen. Based on such formulation, we detect transient communities by clustering the pairs of nodes with similar contact bursts together. We also propose a new data forwarding strategy for delay tolerant networks in which transient communities serve as the data forwarding unit. Evaluation results show that our strategy can achieve much higher data delivery ratio than traditional community-based strategies with comparable network overhead.