Investigation of both local and global topological ingredients on transport efficiency in scale-free networks

This paper investigates the combined effect of local and global topological ingredients for routing packets on transport efficiency in scale-free networks with different degree exponents. Four different transport efficiency measurements, namely, the critical packet generation rate, the average number of overall packet loads, the relative variance of packet number on each node, and the relative variance of transport time from source to destination, are investigated in this paper. The combined effects of global and local ingredients on four measurements are presented and analyzed. We also investigate the effect of degree exponent on four measurements. Based on the results we obtained, we propose an improved routing strategy with memory information. Simulation results show that the critical packet generation rate can be efficiently improved by using the improved routing strategy with memory information, especially when packets are showing strong inclination of being forwarded to low-degree or high-degree nodes in scale-free networks with small degree exponents. (C) 2009 American Institute of Physics. [doi: 10.1063/1.3272217]