Agent based P2P Social Neworks Modeling

Nowadays, social networks are the most important means for the interaction between people on the Web. The large part of such networks are deployed on a centralized architecture that allows a simple browser-based user experience and, moreover, many algorithms, e.g., friend suggestion, are far easier and more efficient to implement in this setting. Peer-to-peer social networks do not exploit a central server for storing users' data. Therefore, their development and maintenance is more difficult, but they enable users to have more control on their profile content, ensuring a higher level of privacy. The main challenge of such a kind of network comes from guaranteeing availability of the data of the user profiles when their owners are offline. Different solutions have been proposed, but each of them presents advantages and drawbacks (e.g., data availability vs. cost). In this paper we present our preliminary work on the design of a peer-to-peer social network architecture that took advantage of an actor based development system for the modelling and analysis of a set of possible algorithms that can support the availability of the profiles of the offline users in the social network.