Traffic-driven model of the World Wide Web graph

TL;DR

This paper introduces a traffic-driven model for the Web graph that captures its evolving structure and traffic patterns, reproducing key statistical properties and complex hierarchical architecture observed in real-world data.

Contribution

It presents a novel model coupling topological growth with traffic dynamics, producing realistic weighted directed graphs with properties matching empirical Web data.

Findings

Generated graphs show heavy-tail distributions in topology and traffic.

Model reproduces hierarchical and cohesive structures similar to real Web data.

Captures non-trivial evolution of vertices over time.

Abstract

We propose a model for the World Wide Web graph that couples the topological growth with the traffic's dynamical evolution. The model is based on a simple traffic-driven dynamics and generates weighted directed graphs exhibiting the statistical properties observed in the Web. In particular, the model yields a non-trivial time evolution of vertices and heavy-tail distributions for the topological and traffic properties. The generated graphs exhibit a complex architecture with a hierarchy of cohesiveness levels similar to those observed in the analysis of real data.