Modeling and Analysis of Time-Varying Graphs

We live in a world increasingly dominated by networks – communications, social, information, biological etc. A central attribute of many of these networks is that they are dynamic, that is, they exhibit structural changes over time. While the practice of dynamic networks has proliferated, we lag behind in the fundamental, mathematical understanding of network dynamism. Existing research on time-varying graphs ranges from preliminary algorithmic studies (e.g., Ferreira’s work on evolving graphs) to analysis of specific properties such as flooding time in dynamic random graphs. A popular model for studying dynamic graphs is a sequence of graphs arranged by increasing snapshots of time. In this paper, we study the fundamental property of reachability in a time-varying graph over time and characterize the latency with respect to two metrics, namely store-or-advance latency and cut-through latency. Instead of expected value analysis, we concentrate on characterizing the exact probability distribution of routing latency along a randomly intermittent path in two popular dynamic random graph models. Using this analysis, we characterize the loss of accuracy (in a probabilistic setting) between multiple temporal graph models, ranging from one that preserves all the temporal ordering information for the purpose of computing temporal graph properties to one that collapses various snapshots into one graph (an operation called smashing), with multiple intermediate variants. We also show how some other traditional graph theoretic properties can be extended to the temporal domain. Finally, we propose algorithms for controlling the progress of a packet in single-copy adaptive routing schemes in various dynamic random graphs. ∗Research was sponsored by the Army Research Laboratory and was accomplished under Cooperative Agreement Number W911NF-09-2-0053. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Army Research Laboratory or the U.S. Government. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Government purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation here on.