Predicting the availability of users' devices in decentralized online social networks

The understanding of the user temporal behavior is a crucial aspect for all those systems that rely on user resources for daily operations, such as decentralized online social networks (DOSNs). Indeed, DOSNs exploit the devices of their users to take on and share the tasks needed to provide services such as storing the published data. In the last years, the increasing popularity of DOSN services has changed the way of how people interact with each other by enabling users to connect to these services at any time by using their personal devices (such as notebooks or smartphones). As a result, the availability of data in these systems is strongly affected (or reflected) by the temporal behavior of their users in terms of connections to DOSNs. In this paper, we propose the use of linear predictors to address the problem of the availability of user devices and, hence, data in DOSNs. To validate the proposed approaches, we evaluated their performance conducting a set of simulations exploiting a dataset of temporal information concerning the connections to Facebook collected from a set of users.