SCALE-FREE EVOLVING NETWORKS WITH ACCELERATED ATTACHMENT

Abstract

A new evolving network based on the scale-free network of Barabási and Albert (BA) is studied, and the accelerated attachment of new edges is considered in its evolving process. The accelerated attachment is different from the previous accelerated growth of edges and has two particular meanings in this paper. One is that a new vertex with the edges is inserted into the network with acceleration at each time step; the other is that, with a given probability, some additional edges are linked with the vertices in proportion to the number of their obtained edges in the latest evolving periods. The new model describes the cases of those complex networks with a few exceptional vertices. The attachment mechanism of the new adding edges for these vertices does not follow the preferential attachment rule. Comparing with the linear edge growth model, the characteristics of the accelerated growth model are studied theoretically and numerically. We show that the degree distributions of these models have a power law decay and the exponents are larger than that of the BA model. We point out that the characteristics of the exceptional vertices and the aging vertices in an aging network are not identical. The reasons for neglecting this attachment in most of evolving networks are also summarized.