Modeling data dissemination in online social networks: A geographical perspective on bounding network traffic load

In this paper, we model the data dissemination in online social networks (OSNs) and study the scaling laws of traffic load. We propose a three-layered system model to formulate data dissemination sessions for social applications in OSNs. The layered model consists of the physical network layer, social relationship layer, and application session layer. By analyzing mutual relevances among these three layers, we investigate the geographical distribution feature of dissemination sessions in OSNs. Based on this, we derive the traffic load of OSNs under a realistic assumption that every source sustains a data generating rate of constant order. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to address the issue of traffic load scaling for OSNs by modeling the social data dissemination from a layered perspective.