A Small-World Model of Scale-Free Networks: Features and Verifications

Abstract

It is now well known that many large-sized complex networks obey a scale-free power-law vertex-degree distribution. Here, we show that when the vertex degrees of a large-sized network follow a scale-free power-law distribution with exponent  2, the number of degree-1 vertices, if nonzero, is of order N and the average degree is of order lower than log N, where N is the size of the network. Furthermore, we show that the number of degree-1 vertices is divisible by the least common multiple of , , . . ., , and l is less than log N, where l = < is the vertex-degree sequence of the network. The method we developed here relies only on a static condition, which can be easily verified, and we have verified it by a large number of real complex networks.