Scale-free network growth by ranking
Abstract
The dynamics of network growth is usually explained through mechanisms that rely on measures of node prestige, such as degree or fitness. In many real networks the information available to those who create and connect nodes is not the value of a node's prestige but a ranking of the nodes by their prestige. We propose a criterion of network growth that explicitly relies on the ranking of the nodes according to a prestige measure, be it age or degree. The resulting network has a scale-free degree distribution when the probability to link a target node is any power law function of its rank, even when one has only partial information of node ranks. Our criterion may explain the frequency and robustness of scale-free degree distributions in real networks, as illustrated by the special case of the Web graph.Keywords
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