Optimal traffic networks

Inspired by studies on the airports’ network and the physical Internet, we propose a general model of weighted networks via an optimization principle. The topology of the optimal network turns out to be a spanning tree that minimizes a combination of topological and metric quantities. It is characterized by strongly heterogeneous traffic, non-trivial correlations between distance and traffic and a broadly distributed centrality. A clear spatial hierarchical organization, with local hubs distributing traffic in smaller regions, emerges as a result of the optimization. Varying the parameters of the cost function, different classes of trees are recovered, including in particular the minimum spanning tree and the shortest path tree. These results suggest that a variational approach represents an alternative and possibly very meaningful path to the study of the structure of complex weighted networks.

• Publication year

  2006

• Venue

  arXiv.org

• Publication date

  2006-01-26

• Fields of study

  Mathematics, Physics, Computer Science, Engineering

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1088/1742-5468/2006/07/L07002arXiv physics/0601203
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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