How Many Nodes are Effectively Accessed in Complex Networks?

TL;DR

This paper investigates the properties of accessibility in complex networks, exploring its relation to exploration time and node visitation, across different types of random walks, to better understand communication efficiency.

Contribution

It characterizes the relationship between accessibility, exploration time, and node visitation, and examines these in various random walk dynamics, providing new insights into network exploration.

Findings

Maximum accessibility correlates with minimal exploration time.

Accessibility relates to the number of nodes visited after a basic time unit.

Different random walk types influence accessibility and exploration dynamics.

Abstract

The measurement called accessibility has been proposed as a means to quantify the efficiency of the communication between nodes in complex networks. This article reports important results regarding the properties of the accessibility, including its relationship with the average minimal time to visit all nodes reachable after $h$ steps along a random walk starting from a source, as well as the number of nodes that are visited after a finite period of time. We characterize the relationship between accessibility and the average number of walks required in order to visit all reachable nodes (the exploration time), conjecture that the maximum accessibility implies the minimal exploration time, and confirm the relationship between the accessibility values and the number of nodes visited after a basic time unit. The latter relationship is investigated with respect to three types of dynamics, namely: traditional random walks, self-avoiding random walks, and preferential random walks.