Effective strategy of adding nodes and links for maximizing the traffic capacity of scale-free network

In this paper, we propose an efficient strategy to enhance traffic capacity via the process of nodes and links increment. We show that by adding shortcut links to the existing networks, packets are avoided flowing through hub nodes. We investigate the performances of our proposed strategy under the shortest path routing strategy and the local routing strategy. Our obtained results show that using the proposed strategy, the traffic capacity can be effectively enhanced under the shortest path routing strategy. Under the local routing strategy, the obtained results show that the proposed strategy is efficient only when packets are more likely to be forwarded to low-degree nodes in their routing paths. Compared with other strategies, the obtained results indicate that our proposed strategy of adding nodes and links is the most effective in enhancing the traffic capacity, i.e., the traffic capacity can be maximally enhanced with the least number of additional nodes and links. © 2010 American Institute of Physics.