Bin Alnaqeeb, Fatima Mohsen2013-02-282013-02-282010-0560125http://bspace.buid.ac.ae/handle/1234/45DISSERTATION WITH DISTINCTIONOur world is becoming an increasingly interconnected world. Connection between different people is being expanded dramatically especially after the vast use of technologies in this area. This expansion necessitates a deep analysis to capture the richness of information that these connections contain. Recently, social networks studies have attracted many researchers from different fields due to their common patterns that exist in wide range of real world networks and the exponential growth of social network sites. One of the important problems in studying social networks is network navigation: how to reach a destination node from a source node using minimum information. In this thesis, our goal is to study the e ect of weights in the network navigation and analyze the inter-play between the homophily, node degree, node strength and node continuous degree. We have identi ed three query routing paradigms based on de ning di erent weights for nodes' edges to guide the navigation process through the network. We then have an extensive experimental study of the performance of incorporating weights into the network for different degrees, homophily parameters and different types of networks.ensocial networksnetwork navigationDissertation