Studies on friendships in online social networks involving geographic distance have so far relied on the city location provided in users profiles. Consequently, most of the research on friendships have provided accuracy at the city level, at best, to
designate a users location. This study analyzes a Twitter dataset because it provides the exact geographic distance between corresponding users. We start by introducing a strong definition of friend on Twitter (i.e., a definition of bidirectional friendship), requiring bidirectional communication. Next, we utilize geo-tagged mentions delivered by users to determine their locations, where @username is contained anywhere in the body of tweets. To provide analysis results, we first introduce a friend counting algorithm. From the fact that Twitter users are likely to post consecutive tweets in the static mode, we also introduce a two-stage distance estimation algorithm. As the first of our main contributions, we verify that the number of friends of a particular Twitter user follows a well-known power-law distribution (i.e., a Zipfs distribution or a Pareto distribution). Our study also provides the following newly-discovered friendship degree related to the issue of space: The number of friends according to distance follows a double power-law (i.e., a double Pareto law) distribution, indicating that the probability of befriending a particular Twitter user is significantly reduced beyond a certain geographic distance between users, termed the separation point. Our analysis provides concrete evidence that Twitter can be a useful platform for assigning a more accurate scalar value to the degree of friendship between two users.
This paper analyzes the impact and benefits of infrastructure support in improving the throughput scaling in networks of $n$ randomly located wireless nodes. The infrastructure uses multi-antenna base stations (BSs), in which the number of BSs and th
e number of antennas at each BS can scale at arbitrary rates relative to $n$. Under the model, capacity scaling laws are analyzed for both dense and extended networks. Two BS-based routing schemes are first introduced in this study: an infrastructure-supported single-hop (ISH) routing protocol with multiple-access uplink and broadcast downlink and an infrastructure-supported multi-hop (IMH) routing protocol. Then, their achievable throughput scalings are analyzed. These schemes are compared against two conventional schemes without BSs: the multi-hop (MH) transmission and hierarchical cooperation (HC) schemes. It is shown that a linear throughput scaling is achieved in dense networks, as in the case without help of BSs. In contrast, the proposed BS-based routing schemes can, under realistic network conditions, improve the throughput scaling significantly in extended networks. The gain comes from the following advantages of these BS-based protocols. First, more nodes can transmit simultaneously in the proposed scheme than in the MH scheme if the number of BSs and the number of antennas are large enough. Second, by improving the long-distance signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the received signal power can be larger than that of the HC, enabling a better throughput scaling under extended networks. Furthermore, by deriving the corresponding information-theoretic cut-set upper bounds, it is shown under extended networks that a combination of four schemes IMH, ISH, MH, and HC is order-optimal in all operating regimes.
