Maximum coverage and maximum connected covering in social networks with partial topology information

Viral marketing campaigns seek to recruit the most influential individuals to cover the largest target audience. This can be modeled as the well-studied maximum coverage problem. Another related problem, called the maximum connected cover, is when recruited nodes have to be connected. This problem ensures a strong coordination among the influential nodes which are the backbone of the marketing campaign. In this work, we are interested on both of these problems. Most of the related literature assumes knowledge about the topology of the network. Even in that case, the problem is known to be NP-hard. We analyse heuristics to these models assuming different knowledge levels about the topology of the network. We quantify the difference between these heuristics and the local and global greedy algorithms.