Scale-free user-network approach to telephone network traffic analysis

The effect of the user network on the telephone network traffic is studied in this paper. Unlike classical traffic analysis, where users are assumed to be connected uniformly, our proposed method employs a scale-free network to model the behavior of telephone users. Each user has a fixed set of acquaintances with whom the user may communicate, and the number of acquaintances follows a power-law distribution. We show that compared to conventional analysis based upon a fully connected user network, the network traffic is significantly different when the user network assumes a scale-free property. Specifically, network blocking (call failure) is generally more severe in the case of a scale-free user network. It is also shown that the carried traffic is practically limited by the scale-free property of the user network, rather than by the network capacity. © 2005 The American Physical Society.