As the de facto global information infrastructure that underpins much of today's commercial, social, political and cultural activities, the Internet now provides a convenient, speedy (near instant), and sometimes anonymous means to connect and communicate, and more broadly speaking, to ``social-network'' with other people, breaking the geographical, cultural, socio-economic, and other barriers. These ``social networks?? reflect the social interactions, behaviors and interests of human users, and influence what information is accessed and what services are used. On the other hand, the Internet and its constituent network and service infrastructures -- the underlying ``technical networks'' which connect human users, the end devices they use for communications and information access, and various servers hosting Internet services -- determine how information and services are accessed and delivered. Hence, the interplay and interactions of the socio-technical networks drive innovation, adoption and spread of both Internet applications and the technologies that enable them. As the research community contemplates ``clean-state'' re-designs of a future Internet architecture, it is therefore both important and imperative to understand and account for such interplay and interactions.
Intellectual Merit. This research project explores and studies the interplay and interactions of socio-technical networks through network traffic. Telecommunications networks exist to carry and deliver traffic generated by various applications and services to enable communications, information access and sharing, and social interactions among users. Hence network traffic and its spatial and temporal dynamics implicitly reflect user behaviors, social communities, and emergent trends. The researchers advance the novel notion of network traffic activity graphs (TAGs) to capture the spatial and temporal traffic dynamics, and to uncover and extract significant communication patters and structural dynamics therein. The researchers employ TAGs as a main tool to study the interplay and interactions of socio-technical networks by addressing two broad sets of inter-related questions: i) how to extract network-wide, spatial and temporal communication patterns and other structural dynamics inherent in network traffic, and use them to help reveal the social interactions, community structures and user behaviors? and ii) how to meaningfully analyze and quantify the effects of the interplay and interactions of socio-technical networks, and account for them to better operate, manage, secure and evolve the (technical) networks and the services running on top of them?
Broader Impact. Understanding the interplay and interactions of socio-technical networks will help improve the operations, management and security of today's IP networks as well as emerging services. Such understanding will also provide valuable insight to the design of future networks, so as to better meet the demands and requirements of new Internet services, many of which are too futuristic to have yet been contemplated. All these will bring significant benefits to users, service providers and the society at large. The research project will also provide both undergraduate and graduate students with hands-on experiences in learning large-scale data analytics and network designs. The researchers will actively involve undergraduate students -- especially female students and underrepresented minorities -- in the research project. The researchers plan to disseminate the research outcomes through publications and outreach activities. Through participation in future Internet design forums (e.g., NetSE/GENI) and collaboration with industrial partners, the researchers will seek to impact the development of future Internet technologies and services by explicitly accounting for the interplay and interactions of socio-technical networks.
