English

How Many Nodes are Effectively Accessed in Complex Networks?

Physics and Society 2013-05-30 v3 Statistical Mechanics Social and Information Networks

Abstract

The measurement called accessibility has been proposed as a means to quantify the efficiency of the communication between nodes in complex networks. This article reports important results regarding the properties of the accessibility, including its relationship with the average minimal time to visit all nodes reachable after hh steps along a random walk starting from a source, as well as the number of nodes that are visited after a finite period of time. We characterize the relationship between accessibility and the average number of walks required in order to visit all reachable nodes (the exploration time), conjecture that the maximum accessibility implies the minimal exploration time, and confirm the relationship between the accessibility values and the number of nodes visited after a basic time unit. The latter relationship is investigated with respect to three types of dynamics, namely: traditional random walks, self-avoiding random walks, and preferential random walks.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1101.5379,
  title  = {How Many Nodes are Effectively Accessed in Complex Networks?},
  author = {Matheus P. Viana and João L. B. Batista and Luciano da F. Costa},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1101.5379},
  year   = {2013}
}

Comments

8 pages and 7 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-21T17:18:02.535Z