Analysis and implications of student contact patterns derived from campus schedules

Abstract

Characterizing mobility or contact patterns in a campus environment is of interest for a variety of reasons. Existing studies of these patterns can be classified into two basic approaches - model based and measurement based. The model based approach involves constructing a mathematical model to generate movement patterns while the measurement based approach measures locations and proximity of wireless devices to infer mobility patterns. In this paper, we take a completely different approach. First we obtain the class schedules and class rosters from a university-wide Intranet learning portal, and use this information to infer contacts made between students. The value of our approach is in the population size involved in the study, where contact patterns among 22341 students are analyzed. This paper presents the characteristics of these contact patterns, and explores how these patterns affect three scenarios. We first look at the characteristics from the DTN perspective, where we study inter-contact time and time distance between pairs of students. Next, we present how these characteristics impact the spread of mobile computer viruses, and show that viruses can spread to virtually the entire student population within a day. Finally, we consider aggregation of information from a large number of mobile, distributed sources, and demonstrate that the contact patterns can be exploited to design efficient aggregation algorithms, in which only a small number of nodes (less than 0.5%) is needed to aggregate a large fraction (over 90%) of the data.