Structural hole based link addition for capacity enhancement in scale-free networks

We propose a link-addition strategy, called reduction structural hole (RSH), to enhance the network transport efficiency for scale-free networks. With the development of information technology, traffic capacity becomes an increasingly hot problem for high-speed communications. Adding links to existing networks provides an effective way to enhance traffic capacity. In previous studies, global parameters such as betweenness centrality and shortest path length are commonly used in link addition, in this research however, the structural hole theory is applied to designing the new link-addition strategy that uses local parameters. Specifically, in the proposed RSH link-addition strategy, the concept of network constraint index, which comes from theory of social science and needs only local information, is used to guide how to add links to the existing topology. Theoretical analysis and simulation shows that RSH obtains increased transport capacity and decreased average path length compared with the existing improved efficient (IE) link-addition strategy when used with either the shortest path or efficient routing scheme. In addition, simulations also show that the RSH strategy does not change the scale-free and connectivity characteristics of the network, and thus keeps the strong robustness of a scale-free topology. Both analysis and simulation verify the effectiveness of the proposed link-addition mechanism.