Socio-technological Testbed for Evaluation of Combined Social and Communication Networks

A socio-technological network can be viewed as a hybrid network that combines heterogeneous communication and social links. Although there have been an increasing number of efforts to study the design and performance of socio-technological networks via theoretical analysis or simulations, little attention has been focused on conducting field or test bed experiments due to the heterogeneity and complexity of these interdependent network structures. To fill this gap, we propose and implement a test and evaluation platform to validate the design and evaluate the performance of combined social and communication networks. The test bed consists of programmable WiFi radios that represent users (according to real social network data) communicating over a multi-hop wireless channel emulator. We run a variety of network applications over the test bed, including information dissemination and social-aware routing. Experimental results show that combined design of social and communication networks can substantially improve the performance (e.g., Message delay and delivery ratio) in real-world scenarios. Motivated by these results, our test bed platform provides a high fidelity environment for design, implementation, test, and evaluation of combined social and communication networks.