Cross-community approach for efficient information retrieval in social networking

Today, online social networking (OSN) has become the most used application service in the Internet. As shown in Facebook and Twitter, the network is constructed based on the social community structure, and the information is propagated from friend to friend, like a word of mouth. Such social-centric networking is one of new directions for new communication style in the Future Internet, which realizes scalable, robust, and self-controllable traffic control. However, many technical challenges exist to apply the structure of social network to the real networking infrastructure, especially vulnerability or workload of hub nodes. This paper first states the overworked hub problem which degrades seriously the search efficiency in social-centric networks. We propose a new communication style to solve the problem by using cross-community approach. Through preliminary results we show that workload of hub node can be reduced and information retrieval efficiency is improved by considering cross-community approach.