Empirical study of the role of the topology in spreading on communication networks

TL;DR

This study investigates how the topology of communication networks, especially inter-city links, influences the speed of spreading processes like SI, using real mobile phone data and simulations to highlight the importance of network structure.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on the impact of inter-city links on spreading speed in temporal communication networks, emphasizing the role of network topology.

Findings

Inter-city links significantly accelerate spreading.

Intra-city networks are sparse and rely on average degree.

Model simulations confirm the impact of topology on spreading speed.

Abstract

Topological aspects, like community structure, and temporal activity patterns, like burstiness, have been shown to severly influence the speed of spreading in temporal networks. We study the influence of the topology on the susceptible-infected (SI) spreading on time stamped communication networks, as obtained from a dataset of mobile phone records. We consider city level networks with intra- and inter-city connections. The networks using only intra-city links are usually sparse, where the spreading depends mainly on the average degree. The inter-city links serve as bridges in spreading, speeding up considerably the process. We demonstrate the effect also on model simulations.