Abstract
Hundreds of millions of devices—from book-sized notebooks to tiny hand-held mobile phones—are equipped with wireless communication adapters that are able to form a network among themselves. The spontaneous creation of this kind of network and the unpredictable joining and leaving of devices bring forward new challenges on network and topology organization. Network Science has proven to deliver a fruitful methodology to investigate systems such as complex communication networks, and new insights and solutions can be gained by understanding and imitating the function and structure of social networks. Following this line, this paper initially focuses on the development of models that reveal characteristics found to be inherent to social networks. In particular, we consider the finding that social networks can contain a diversity of links: we create clusters of friends, connected by strong links and, additionally, there are links to acquaintances, the so-called weak ties which, despite the name, have been hypothesized as essential for finding jobs or disseminating rumors when strong ties fail. As such links seem to be highly important to deal with the requirements of a complex network such as our own social network, we argue that bringing these structures to the design principles of complex communication networks may result in an increase of efficiency and robustness, and we describe the implementation of two algorithms for wireless communication networks using only local neighborhood information and producing features of complex social networks (weak ties in particular). The results imply that local removing promotes the emergence of weak ties, which we found by using a recently proposed link clustering algorithm for identifying link communities.
We are grateful to FAPESP, CNPq and CAPES for supporting the research reported in this paper.
Access provided by Autonomous University of Puebla. Download to read the full chapter text
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
References
Ahn, Yong-Yeol Bagrow, J.P., Lehmann, S.: Link communities reveal multiscale complexity in networks. Nature 466(7307), 761–764 (2010)
Awerbuch, B.: Complexity of Network Synchronization. Journal of the ACM (JACM) 32(4), 804–823 (1985)
Clark, B.N., Colbourn, C.J., Johnson, D.S.: Unit disk graphs. Discrete Mathematics 86(1-3), 165–177 (1991)
Granovetter, M.S.: The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology 78(6), 1360 (1973)
Helmy, A.: Small worlds in wireless networks. IEEE Communications Letters 7(10), 490–492 (2003)
Kahn, J.M., Katz, R.H., Pister, K.S.J.: Next century challenges: Mobile Networking for ”Small Dust”. In: Proceedings of the 5th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking MobiCom 1999, pp. 271–278. ACM Press, New York (1999)
Kumpula, J., Onnela, J.-P., Saramäki, J., Kertész, J., Kaski, K.: Model of Community Emergence in weighted Social Networks. Computer Physics Communications 180(4), 517–522 (2009)
Santi, P.: Topology Control in Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks. Wiley (2005)
Vega-Redondo, F., Chesher, A., Jackson, M.: Complex Social Networks, 1st edn. Cambridge University Press (2007)
Wattenhofer, R.: Sensor Networks: Distributed Algorithms Reloaded - Or Revolutions? In: 13th Colloquium on Structural Information and Communication Complexity, SIROCCO (2006)
Watts, D.J.: Small Worlds - The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness. Princeton University Press (1999)
Watts, D.J., Strogatz, S.H.: Collective dynamics of small-world networks. Nature 393(6684), 440–442 (1998)
Weiser, M.: The computer for the 21 st century. ACM SIGMOBILE Mobile Computing and Communications Review 3(3), 3–11 (1999)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Leonel, A., Ribeiro, C.H.C., Brust, M.R. (2013). Weak Ties in Complex Wireless Communication Networks. In: Menezes, R., Evsukoff, A., González, M. (eds) Complex Networks. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 424. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30287-9_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30287-9_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-30286-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-30287-9
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)