Hybrid traffic dynamics on coupled networks

Abstract

Recent researches indicate that real network systems are often coupled together by shared links or interconnecting nodes, through which different networks can communicate with each other. Therefore, both intra-traffic and inter-traffic coexist in these systems. In this paper, we study such kind of hybrid traffic flow considering three coupling mechanisms: (i) assortative coupling, (ii) disassortative coupling, and (ii) the newly proposed anti-assortative coupling. The results show that the anti-assortative coupling can achieve higher traffic capacity, especially when the inter-traffic level is high. The traffic capacity of system exhibits non-monotonic behavior with the coupling strength. With the anti-assortative coupling mechanism, the system capacity can be improved at an optimized coupling strength of β≈0.3. We further propose an index called effective betweenness, based on which the traffic capacity of such coupled systems can be theoretically predicted.