Search in Power-Law Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces local search strategies that leverage high-degree nodes in power-law networks to enable efficient, sub-linear cost search algorithms, demonstrated on the Gnutella peer-to-peer network.

Contribution

The paper presents novel local search algorithms exploiting high-degree hubs in power-law networks, achieving sub-linear search costs.

Findings

Strategies effectively utilize high-degree nodes for search

Algorithms scale sub-linearly with network size

Validated on Gnutella peer-to-peer network

Abstract

Many communication and social networks have power-law link distributions, containing a few nodes which have a very high degree and many with low degree. The high connectivity nodes play the important role of hubs in communication and networking, a fact which can be exploited when designing efficient search algorithms. We introduce a number of local search strategies which utilize high degree nodes in power-law graphs and which have costs which scale sub-linearly with the size of the graph. We also demonstrate the utility of these strategies on the Gnutella peer-to-peer network.