Effective hybrid link-adding strategy to enhance network transport efficiency for scale-free networks

In this paper, we propose a new strategy (HLS) to enhance the transport capacity of scale-free networks by adding links to the existing networks, based on the betweenness of nodes, the shortest path length and the betweenness of links. Since only slight amounts of nodes in scale-free networks have high betweenness centrality, local link-adding strategy is adopted as a part of HLS for target nodes, which can significantly reduce the load of target nodes. Moreover, in order to improve the robustness of our strategy under some extreme cases, second sorting procedure is introduced in HLS. Simulation results show that HLS outperforms the IE strategy in terms of transport capacity and delivering ability of scale-free networks. After the adding links process of HLS, the congestion can be alleviated efficiently, which is meaningful to the realistic networks.