Enhancing traffic capacity of scale-free networks by link-directed strategy

The transport efficiency of a network is strongly related to the underlying structure. In this paper, we propose an efficient strategy named high-betweenness-first (HBF) for the purpose of improving the traffic handling capacity of scale-free networks by limiting a fraction of undirected links to be unidirectional ones based on the links’ betweenness. Compared with the high-degree-first (HDF) strategy, the traffic capacity can be more significantly enhanced under the proposed link-directed strategy with the shortest path (SP) routing protocol. Simulation results in the Barabási–Albert (BA) model for scale-free networks show that the critical generating rate [Formula: see text] which can evaluate the overall traffic capacity of a network system is larger after applying the HBF strategy, especially with nonrandom direction-determining rules. Because of the strongly improved traffic capacity, this work is helpful to design and optimize modern communication networks such as the software defined network.