Inter Action Time in Virtual and Physical Spaces: A Comparative Study

We examine the human behavior that determines the basic performance metrics of virtual and physical spaces. Using the measured data traces, we first study the distribution of inter-action-time between users. We find that the distribution in both cases follows a power law with an exponential decay. We further evaluate the message transmission time with the power law distribution, we show that the transmission delay in physical space (device to device) is competitive with that in virtual space. Our results provide a new insight on the link between the two spaces, and support the device-to-device communication in cyber-physical system with a delay-tolerant feature.