Competitive Interaction Model for Online Social Networks’ Users’ Data Forwarding at a Subnet

Social Networks Ecosystem is evolving faster and Social Networks users’ intensive activities are affecting significantly the network traffic. Generated data from different sending and receiving hosts have to be handled by network active nodes and links. In this paper, we propose to study the interaction between two types of network active hosts by using a Lotka-Volterra competitive system that considers the subnet limiting supply. We applied our proposed model to two kinds of Online Social Networks’ (OSNs’) users characterized by the intensity of their activities from the generated data perspective. We assumed and proved that the impact of competition is flexible and subject to forwarding protocol and subnet allocated resources. By taking the competition case in the analysis of the differential equations, we show that when competition exists, one stable equilibrium point can be found if certain conditions are respected. Numerical results confirm our theoretical analysis and show that instead of treating equally at the subnet level all data from active hosts, adopting a routing protocol that takes into account the nature of data and the forwarding time is necessary for improving the overall performance of the network.