Influence of weight heterogeneity on random walks in scale-free networks

Abstract

Many systems are best described by weighted networks, in which the weights of the edges are heterogeneous. In this paper, we focus on random walks in weighted network, investigating the impacts of weight heterogeneity on the behavior of random walks. We study random walks in a family of weighted scale-free tree-like networks with power-law weight distribution. We concentrate on three cases of random walk problems: with a trap located at a hub node, a leaf adjacent to a hub node, and a farthest leaf node from a hub. For all these cases, we calculate analytically the global mean first passage time (GMFPT) measuring the efficiency of random walk, as well as the leading scaling of GMFPT. We find a significant decrease in the dominating scaling of GMFPT compared with the corresponding binary networks in all three random walk problems, which implies that weight heterogeneity has a significant influence on random walks in scale-free networks.