Structures of Human Relations and User-Dynamics Revealed by Traffic Data

Masaki AIDA  Keisuke ISHIBASHI  Hiroyoshi MIWA  Chisa TAKANO  Shin-ichi KURIBAYASHI  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems   Vol.E87-D   No.6   pp.1454-1460
Publication Date: 2004/06/01
Online ISSN: 
DOI: 
Print ISSN: 0916-8532
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on Human Communication I)
Category: 
Keyword: 
i-mode,  traffic,  scale-free network,  human relations,  Zipf's law,  

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Summary: 
The number of customers of a service for Internet access from cellular phones in Japan has been explosively increasing for some time. We analyze the relation between the number of customers and the volume of traffic, with a view to finding clues to the structure of human relations among the very large set of potential customers of the service. The traffic data reveals that this structure is a scale-free network, and we calculate the exponent that governs the distribution of node degree in this network. The data also indicates that people who have many friends tend to subscribe to the service at an earlier stage. These results are useful for investigating various fields, including marketing strategies, the propagation of rumors, the spread of computer viruses, and so on.