Link recommendation in P2P social networks

Abstract

Social networks have been mostly based on a centralized infrastructure where the owner hosts all the data and services. This model of “fat server & thin clients” results in many systems and practical problems such as privacy, censorship, scalability, and fault-tolerance. While a P2P infrastructure would be a natural alternative for implementing social networks, it has surprisingly not attracted enough attention yet. Significant research is needed to develop a P2P social network system. From an algorithmic perspective, most graph algorithms for social networks assume that the global graph is available. These need to be revisited in a P2P setting where the nodes have limited information with connectivity to only their neighbors. Following these observations, in this paper, we focus on social network link recommendation problem in a P2P setting. We investigate methods to recommend links to improve social connections as well as the efficiency of the overlay network. We evaluate our methods with respect to measures developed for P2P social networks.