Complex Contagions Models in Opportunistic Mobile Social Networks

Information contagions is one of the key applications in opportunistic mobile social networks (OMSNs). Most of the recent work only considers the simple contagions, in which the “infected” node will infect each of its opinion-free neighbors through simple contact. However, when the behaviors, beliefs, or preferences spread through the social contact, the willingness to participate may require independent affirmation or reinforcement from multiple sources. In this paper, we first review two complex contagions schemes proposed recently: ring lattice-based complex contagions (RLCC) and grid-based complex contagions (GCC) approaches. However, these two approaches do not consider the hierarchical structure in social network. Then, we present three novel hierarchical complex contagions models: tree-based complex contagions (TCC), which is a binary tree model; clique-based complex contagions (CCC), in which there is a k-clique and other nodes connect to every node in the k-clique, and hypercube-based complex contagions (HCC), which is a balanced hypercube model. Extensive analysis and simulations are conducted in comparison to these approaches. CCC has the smallest delivery delay when there is only one message, while HCC has the best performance when the number of messages increases.