A link stream is a sequence of triplets (t, a, b) meaning that an interaction occurred between a and b at time t. Data exchanges between devices, packet transfers between routers, contacts between individuals or sensors, on-line sales or messaging, mobility from one place to another, and many other situations may be modeled by link streams. Studying the structure and dynamics of such streams is therefore crucial for many fundamental and applied computer networking questions, ranging from security to protocol design, and including for instance privacy concerns, delay tolerant networks, ad-hoc networks, anomaly detection, or information spreading. This raises many challenging issues, which are at the core of an intense research activity currently, with contributions relying on graphs, complex networks, signal processing, traffic monitoring, social networks, probabilities, and many others.
This special issue is devoted to all aspects of challenges raised by link streams in computer networks. It aims at promoting research on both methods and applications related to these topics by putting together competing and complementary approaches, identifying key results, methods, and directions, as well as encouraging the convergence of these diverse work.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- properties of link streams, descriptive statistics
- information and data spreading in link streams
- general methods for the analysis of link streams
- analysis and modeling of traffic, mobility, uses, and other traces
- anomaly/event/attack/fraud detection and fighting
- on-line, streaming, and external memory processing of link streams
- interplay between network and traffic of any kind
- case studies presenting appropriate data, analysis and interpretation