Looking into the surround of contacts in intermittently-connected wireless networks

Marcelo Dias De Amorim

14/01/2010, de 11H00 à 12H00, en salle 847

Slides

In this talk, we will discuss some preliminary work on the spatial characterization of intermittently-connected wireless networks. The motivation is that the literature has focused almost exclusively on the temporal aspect of contacts and inter-contacts between nodes. Furthermore, it is frequently assumed that contacts have infinite capacity, which is a too strong consideration especially in wireless networks. We propose the surround indicator as a metric to exhibit the spatial dimension of contacts in opportunistic networks. This metric can be used for example as a measure of potential interference that a contact might undergo or to understand the validity of forwarding strategies like betweenness centrality. We evaluate the surround indicator on two existing datasets. Our preliminary results reveal that contacts have too heterogeneous surrounds to be considered only in terms of duration. This work is part of Nadjet Belblidia’s thesis and is done in collaboration with Jérémie Leguay (Thalès), Vania Conan (Thalès), Jon Crowcroft (Cambridge University), and Serge Fdida (UPMC).

Réseaux sociaux égocentriques

Christophe Prieur

19/11/2009, de 11H00 à 12H00, en salle 555

Slides

En dix ans, la vision Google des réseaux sociaux a cédé la place à la vision Facebook. Dans le milieu des années 90, avec l’apparition du web et son intégration progressive dans la société, s’est répandue l’image d’un monde connecté, village global traversé par les autoroutes de l’information permettant de relier n’importe qui à n’importe qui d’autre en six degrés de séparation. En 1998, Google apportait à cette civilisation-là un algorithme permettant de traiter le gigantesque bazar que constituait déjà le graphe des pages web, permettant d’en extraire les pages les plus pertinentes pour le genre humain. Aujourd’hui, les résultats de Google sont un acquis, c’est la wikipédie de tout un chacun, presque aussi poussiéreuse que le Larousse de la grand-mère. Je sais, quand j’en ai besoin, chercher des informations dans le réseau des réseaux, reste donc à trouver des informations quand je ne les cherche pas (Google ne me dira ce qu’est Paf le chien que si j’ai l’idée de le lui demander), et pour cela, écouter ce qui se passe dans… mon réseau. Parce que si je suis à O(6) degrés de séparation de n’importe qui, je préfère réduire la portée de mon réseau pour limiter la cacophonie, et le pagerank ne m’aidera pas pour ça. Nous allons donc profiter de notre expérience de vieux googliens pour aborder les réseaux personnels avec des outils que les anciens analystes des réseaux sociaux n’avaient pas, quitte à ce qu’ils nous reprochent de leur piquer leur jouet.

Vidéo à la demande en Peer-to-peer intégral

Fabien de Montgolfier

12/11/2009, de 11H00 à 12H00, salle 847

Slides

La vidéo à la demande (VoD) est un service en pleine expansion. Avec le développement des modems ( box ) d’accès à l’ADSL, offrant maintenant des capacités de stockage, on peut imaginer un service totalement décentralisé. Les films sont pré-chargés sur certains modems. Les utilisateurs se connectent aux modems qui les ont pré-chargés et visionnent, sans intervention d’un serveur (d’où un service robuste et à coût faible). Nous montrons que le nombre de films disponibles peut croitre de façon linéaire (ou quasi-linéaire sous d’autres hypothèses) en fonction du nombre de modems et que toutes requêtes d’utilisateurs peuvent être satisfaites AFP. Travail réalisé avec Y. Boufkhad, F. Mathieu, D. Perino et L. Viennot.

Optimisation locale multi-niveaux de la modularité

Thomas Aynaud, Vincent Blondel, Jean-Loup Guillaume and Renaud Lambiotte

in Partitionnement de graphe : optimisation et applications, Traité IC2, Hermes-Lavoisier 2011

Dans ce chapitre, nous présentons une méthode gloutonne pour optimiser la modularité d’un graphe. Cette méthode de partionnement permet de traiter avec une excellente précision des systèmes de taille inégalée, allant jusqu’à plusieurs milliards de liens. Notre algorithme a de surcroît l’avantage de ne pas être limité à l’optimisation de la modularité puisqu’il peut être généralisé à d’autres fonctions de qualité, et de découvrir des communautés à différentes échelles. Les performances de l’algorithme sont évaluées sur des graphes artificiels pour lesquels la structure communautaire est connue, ainsi que sur des graphes de terrain réels.

Long range community detection

Thomas Aynaud and Jean-Loup Guillaume

Latin-American Workshop on Dynamic Networks (LAWDN), Buenos Aires, 2010

Complex networks can usually be divided in dense subnetworks called communities. In evolving networks, the usual way to detect communities is to find several partitions independently, one for each time step. However, this generally causes troubles when trying to track communities from one time step to the next. We propose here a new method to detect only one decomposition in communities that is good for (almost) every time step. We show that this unique partition can be computed with a modification of the Louvain method and that the loss of quality at each time step is generally low despite the constraint of global maximization. We also show that some specific modifications of the networks topology can be identified using this unique partition in the case of the Internet topology.

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Détection de communautés à long terme dans les graphes dynamiques

Thomas Aynaud and Jean-Loup Guillaume

Journée thématique Fouille de grands graphes, en conjonction avec la première conférence sur les Modèles et l’Analyse des Réseaux : Approches Mathématiques et Informatique (MARAMI), Toulouse, France, 2010

La plupart des graphes de terrain peuvent être décomposés en sous graphes denses appelés communautés. Habituellement, dans des graphes dynamiques, les communautés sont détectées pour chaque instant indépendamment ce qui pose de nombreux problèmes tels que la stabilité ou le suivi de des communautés entre deux décompositions successives. Nous proposons ici une méthode pour trouver une partition unique, de qualité, couvrant une longue période. Cette décomposition peut être trouvée efficacement via une adaptation de la méthode de Louvain et la perte de qualité à chaque instant due à la contrainte de détecter des communautés globales s’avère assez faible.

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Termination of Multipartite Graph Series Arising from Complex Network Modelling

Matthieu Latapy, Thi Ha Duong Phan, Christophe Crespelle, Thanh Qui Nguyen

COCOA 2010

An intense activity is nowadays devoted to the definition of models capturing the properties of complex networks. Among the most promising approaches, it has been proposed to model these graphs via their clique incidence bipartite graphs. However, this approach has, until now, severe limitations resulting from its incapacity to reproduce a key property of this object: the overlapping nature of cliques in complex networks. In order to get rid of these limitations we propose to encode the structure of clique overlaps in a network thanks to a process consisting in iteratively factorising the maximal bicliques between the upper level and the other levels of a multipartite graph. We show that the most natural definition of this factorising process leads to infinite series for some instances. Our main result is to design a restriction of this process that terminates for any arbitrary graph. Moreover, we show that the resulting multipartite graph has remarkable combinatorial properties and is closely related to another fundamental combinatorial object. Finally, we show that, in practice, this multipartite graph is computationally tractable and has a size that makes it suitable for complex network modelling.

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Evaluation of a new method for measuring the internet degree distribution: Simulation results

Christophe Crespelle and Fabien Tarissan

in Complex Networks, special issue of Computer Communications, 34-5, pp. 635-648 (2011), DOI: 10.1016/j.comcom.2010.06.006

Many contributions rely on the degree distribution of the Internet topology. However, current knowledge of this property is based on biased and erroneous measurements and is subject to much debate. Recently, a new approach, referred to as the Neighborhood Flooding method, was proposed to avoid issues raised by classical measurements. It aims at measuring the neighborhood of Internet core routers by sending traceroute probes from many monitors distributed in the Internet towards a given target router. In this paper, we investigate the accuracy of this method with simulations. Our results show that Neighborhood Flooding is free from the bias highlighted in the classical approach and is able to observe properly the exact degree of a vast majority of nodes in the core of the network. We show how the quality of the estimation depends on the number of monitors used and we carefully examine the influence of parameters of the simulations on our results. We also point out some limitations of the Neighborhood Flooding method and discuss their impact on the observed distribution.

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Static community detection algorithms for evolving networks

Thomas Aynaud and Jean-Loup Guillaume

Proceedings of International Workshop on Dynamic Networks (WDN), in conjunction with WiOpt 2010, pages 508-514

Complex networks can often be divided in dense sub-networks called communities. We study, using a partition edit distance, how three community detection algorithms transform their outputs if the input network is sligthly modified. The instabilities appear to be important and we propose a modification of one algorithm to stabilize it and to allow the tracking of the communities in a dynamic network. This modification has one parameter which is a tradeoff between stability and quality. The resulting algorithm appears to be very effective. We finally use it on a dynamic network of blogs.

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Some Insight on Dynamics of Posts and Citations in Different Blog Communities

Abdelhamid Salah Brahim, Bénédicte Le Grand and Matthieu Latapy

IEEE ICC 2010 workshop « SocNets », Cape Town, South Africa, May 2010

This paper explores new approaches and methods to characterize post and citation dynamics in different blog communities. In particular, evolution of post popularity over time is studied, as well as information spreading cascades. This methodology goes beyond traditional approaches by defining classes of dynamic behaviors based on topological features of the post network, and by investigating the impact of topical communities on post popularity dynamics and on information spreading cascades. This methodology has been applied to a corpus of active French blogs monitored during 4 months.

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Impact of Sources and Destinations on the Observed Properties of the Internet Topology

Frédéric Ouédraogo, Clémence Magnien

Computer Communications, 34, 670-679, 2011

Maps of the internet topology are generally obtained by measuring the routes from a given set of sources to a given set of destinations (with tools such as traceroute). It has been shown that this approach misses some links and nodes. Worse, in some cases it can induce a bias in the obtained data, i.e. the properties of the obtained maps are significantly different from those of the real topology. In order to reduce this bias, the general approach consists in increasing the number of sources. Some works have studied the relevance of this approach. Most of them have used theoretical results, or simulations on network models. Some papers have used real data obtained from actual measurement procedures to evaluate the importance of the number of sources and destinations, but no work to our knowledge has studied extensively the importance of the choice of sources or destinations. Here, we use real data from internet topology measurements to study this question: by comparing partial measurements to our complete data, we can evaluate the impact of adding sources or destinations on the observed properties. We show that the number of sources and destinations used plays a role in the observed properties, but that their choice, and not only their number, also has a strong influence on the observations. We then study common statistics used to describe the internet topology, and show that they behave differently: some can be trusted once the number of sources and destinations are not too small, while others are difficult to evaluate.

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Age, Gender and Communication Networks

Alina Stoica, Zbigniew Smoreda, Christophe Prieur and Jean-Loup Guillaume

Proceedings of the Workshop on the Analysis of Mobile Phone Networks, satellite workshop to NetSci 2010

In this paper, we address some sociological andtopological issues associated with mobile phone communication.Based on a dataset of a few million users, we use customers’ ageand gender information to study relation between theseparameters and the average behavior of users in terms of numberof calls, number of SMS and calls duration. We also study thedataset from a networking point of view: we define differentprofiles based on the topological properties of the personalnetwork of each individual and study the relations between theseprofiles and the age of customers

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Structure multi-échelle de grands graphes de terrain

Thomas Aynaud and Jean-Loup Guillaume

in Technique et Science Informatiques, vol. 30/2, pp. 137-154, 2011

Most complex networks can be divided into dense sub-graphs called communities. These communities may also be divided recursively producing a hierarchical structure of communities, summarized in a tree named dendrogram. In this article we analyze this structure extracted from several complex networks. First we study the shape of the tree and, in particular, communities imbrications. Then we show that an excessive decomposition of communities can result in meaningless communities. We propose a couple of approaches to solve this problem.

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Detecting Events in the Dynamics of Ego-centered Measurements of the Internet Topology

Assia Hamzaoui, Matthieu Latapy and Clémence Magnien

Proceedings of International Workshop on Dynamic Networks (WDN), in conjunction with WiOpt 2010

Detecting events such as major routing changes or congestions in the dynamics of the internet topology is an important but challenging task. We explore here a top-down approach based on a notion of statistically significant events. It consists in identifying statistics which exhibit a homogeneous distribution with outliers, which correspond to events. We apply this approach to ego-centerd measurements of the internet topology (views obtained from a single monitor) and show that it succeeds in detecting meaningful events. Finally, we give some hints for the interpretation of such events in terms of network events.

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Risk diversification and default cascades in financial networks

Stefano Battiston

28 avril 2011 de 11h à 12h en salle 25-26/101

We introduce a discrete dynamics of distress propagation in networks. The formulation combines a diffusion and a contact process which are relevant to complex networks in general. In particular it is more suitable than previous models to describe contagion processes occurring in the financial system. Our results indicate that diversification of risk at the individual level can have an ambiguous effect on the global level, leading in some cases to higher systemic risk. Moreover, we show that the same structure can be resilient or fragile depending on the relative strength of the two processes at play. In the financial context, this corresponds to the level of optimism in the market. Thus, our work has interesting implications for the debate on the network architecture that is most resilient to financial crises.

Structure et dynamique des graphes de terrain bipartis : liens internes et prédiction de liens

Oussama Allali

26 mai 2011 à 11h : salle 25-26/101

Slides

Beaucoup de graphes de terrain, comme les relations acteur-film ou fichier-fournisseur, ont une nature bipartie et sont modélisés par des graphes bipartis, dont les nœuds sont divisés en deux ensembles avec des liens entre des nœuds de différents ensembles seulement. Cependant, il y a actuellement un manque de méthodes pour analyser correctement ces graphes, la plupart des méthodes existantes étant conçues pour des graphes classiques. Une approche courante, mais qui a des limites, consiste à transformer les graphes bipartis en graphes classique, par un procédé appelé projection. Cependant ceci entraîne une perte importante d’informations. Dans cet exposé je présenterai les liens internes et je les proposerai comme une nouvelle notion importante pour analyser les graphes de terrain bipartis : elle permet de mesurer la redondance dans ces graphes, et de mesurer la perte d’information entre un graphe biparti et ses projections. Jemontreraien étudiant différents jeux de données que les liens internes sont très fréquents, et que les statistiques associées permettent de souligner les ressemblances et les différences entre les graphes deterrainbipartis et les graphes bipartis aléatoire. La plupart des graphes de terrain sont de plus dynamiques, c’est-à-dire que leur structure évolue au fil du temps par l’ajout et/ou le retrait de nœuds et/ou de liens. L’étude de la dynamique des graphes de terrain peut s’aborder par le problème de la prédiction de nouveaux liens dans ces graphes. Plusieurs travaux ont étudié le problème de la prédiction de liens dans les graphes classiques (non-bipartis). Toutefois, leurs méthodes ne sont pas directement applicables à, ou appropriées pour, les graphes bipartis. Je présenterai une approche basée sur les liens internes pour la prédiction dans les graphes bipartis. Je montrerai que notre méthode fonctionne très bien, beaucoup mieux que l’approche de recommandation classique.

Estimating properties in dynamic systems: the case of churn in P2P networks

Lamia Benamara and Clémence Magnien

Proceedings of the third International Workshop on Network Science for Communication Networks (NetSciCom 2010), In conjunction with IEEE Infocom 2010.

In many systems, such as P2P systems, the dynamicity of participating elements, or churn, has a strong impact. As a consequence, many efforts have been made to characterize it, and in particular to capture the session length distribution. However in most cases, estimating it rigorously is difficult. One of the reasons is that, because the observation window is by definition finite, parts of the sessions that begin before the window and/or end after it are missed. This induces a bias. Although it tends to decrease when the observation window length increases, it is difficult to quantify its importance, or how fast it decreases. Here, we introduce a general methodology that allows us to know if the observation window is long enough to characterize a given property. This methodology is not specific to one study case and may be applied to any property in a dynamic system. We apply this methodology to the study of session lengths in a massive measurement of P2P activity in the eDonkey system. We show that the measurement needs to last for at least one week in order to obtain representative results. We also show that our methodology allows us to precisely characterize the shape of the session length distribution.

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Dynamique des réseaux de conseil : les mécanismes sociaux à lorigine dune stabilisation précaire

Emmanuel Lazega

17 mars 2011 de 11h à 12h : salle 25-26/101

La question de savoir si la structure dun collectif reste stable malgré un fort turnover de ses membres et un fort turnover des relations entre ces membres est une question classique de la sociologie. Nous proposons une réponse à cette question en procédant à une analyse longitudinale dun réseau de conseil intra-organisationnel explorant la relation entre la structure formelle de lorganisation et un processus dapprentissage collectif par ses membres. Nous identifions une structure centre-périphérie et un mouvement cyclique de centralisation-décentralisation du réseau de conseil. Nous expliquons cette dynamique comme leffet dune oscillation des membres de lorganisation entre surcharge et conflits épistémiques. La question de la stabilité de la structure malgré un fort turnover de ses membres et un fort turnover des relations entre eux est ainsi traduite en termes de stabilisation plus ou moins précaire de cette dynamique par les acteurs du système eux-mêmes.

Rigorous measurement of IP-level neighborhood of Internet core routers

Christophe Crespelle, Matthieu Latapy, Elie Rotenberg

Proceedings of the third International Workshop on Network Science for Communication Networks (NetSciCom 2010), In conjunction with IEEE Infocom 2010.

Many contributions use the degree distribution of IP-level internet topology. However, current knowledge of this property relies on biased and erroneous measurements, and so it is subject to much debate. We introduce here a new approach, dedicated to the core of the internet, which avoids the issues raised by classical measurements. It is based on the measurement of IP-level neighborhood of internet core routers, for which we design and implement a rigorous method. It consists in sending traceroute probes from many monitors distributed in the internet towards a given target router and carefully selecting the relevant information in collected data. Using simulations, we provide strong evidence of the accuracy of our approach. We then conduct real-world measurements illustrating the practical effectiveness of our method. This constitutes a significant step towards reliable knowledge of the IP-level degree distribution of the core of the internet.

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