Universal Behavior of Load Distribution in Scale-Free Networks
K.-I. Uoh, B. Kahng, Do Kyoung Kim · Princeton University Press eBooks · 2011
We study a problem of data packet transport in scale-free networks whose degree distribution follows a power-law with the exponent γ.Load, or betweenness centrality of a vertex is the accumulated total number of data packets passing through that vertex when every pair of vertices send and receive a data packet along the shortest path connecting the pair.It is found that the load distribution follows a power-law with the exponent δ ≈ 2.2(1), insensitive to different values of γ in the range, 2 < γ ≤ 3, and different mean degrees, which is valid for both undirected and directed cases.Thus, we conjecture that the load exponent is a universal quantity to characterize scale-free networks.