Multifractal analysis and topological properties of a new family of weighted Koch networks

Weighted complex networks, especially scale-free networks, which characterize real life systems better than non-weighted networks, have attracted considerable interest in recent years. Studies on the multifractality of weighted complex networks are still to be undertaken. In this paper, inspired by the concepts of Koch networks and Koch island, we propose a new family of weighted Koch networks, and investigate their multifractal behavior and topological properties. We find some key topological properties of the new networks: their vertex cumulative strength has a power-law distribution; there is a power law relationship between their topological degree and weight strength; the networks have a high weighted clustering coefficient of 0.41004 (which is independent of the scaling factor c) in the limit of large generation t; the second smallest eigenvalue mu(2) and the maximum eigenvalue An are approximated by quartic polynomials of the scaling factor c for the general Laplacian operator, while mu(2) is approximately a quartic polynomial of c and mu(n)= 1.5 for the normalized Laplacian operator. Then, we find that weighted koch networks are both fractal and multifractal, their fractal dimension is influenced by the scaling factor c. We also apply these analyses to six real-world networks, and find that the multifractality in three of them are strong. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.