A comprehensive weighted evolving network model

Many social, technological, biological and economical systems are best described by weighted networks, whose properties and dynamics depend not only on their structures but also on the connection weights among their nodes. However, most existing research work on complex network models are concentrated on network structures, with connection weights among their nodes being either 1 or 0. In this paper, we propose a new weighted evolving network model. Numerical simulations indicate that this network model yields three power-law distributions for the node degrees, connection weights and node strengths, respectively. Particularly, some other properties of the distributions, such as the droop-head and heavy-tail effects, can also be reflected by this model. © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.