Geo-cascading and community-cascading in social networks: Comparative analysis and its implications to edge caching

Abstract

The proliferation of social networking service (SNS) enables to share information through social links. Due to the characteristics of information and social properties, the diffused information appears various shapes. It may either be shaped as social communities or geographical regions. In order to investigate different information diffusion behaviors, we study over 54,000 pieces of diffused information in Twitter data set. We propose both macro and micro approaches to distinguish different information diffusion behaviors, either by geo-cascading or community-cascading. We then study the characteristics of information cascading behaviors, which come out with a more sophisticated diffusion network pattern in community-cascading diffusion networks. Furthermore, we conduct the experiments to show the impact of different kinds of information diffusion behaviors in the caching behaviors for mobile edge computing. It turns out that the caching scheme combining both social and geographical factors outperforms the conventional caching schemes.