Do-it-yourself LocalWireless Networks: A Multidimensional Network Analysis of Mobile Node Social Aspects

Abstract

The emerging paradigm of Do-it-yourself (DIY) networking is increasingly taking the attention of research community on DTNs, opportunistic networks and social networks since it allows the creation of local humandriven wireless networks outside the public Internet. Even when Internet is available, DIY networks may form an interesting alternative option for communication encouraging face-to-face interactions and more ambitious objectives such as e-participation and e-democracy. The aim of this paper is to analyze a set of mobility traces describing both local wireless interactions and online friendships in different networking environments in order to explore a fundamental aspect of these social-driven networks: node centrality. Since node centrality plays an important role in message forwarding, we propose a multi-layer network approach to the analysis of online and offline node centrality in DIY networks. Analyzing egocentric and sociocentric node centrality on the social network detected through wireless encounters and on the corresponding Facebook social network for 6 different real-world traces, we show that online and offline degree centralities are significantly correlated on most datasets. On the contrary, betweenness, closeness and eigenvector centralities show medium-low correlation values.