Intermittent exploration on a scale-free network

Abstract

We study an intermittent random walk on a random network of scale-free degree distribution. The walk is a combination of simple random walks of duration $t_w$ and random long-range jumps. While the time the walker needs to cover all the nodes increases with $t_w$, the corresponding time for the edges displays a non monotonic behavior with a minimum for some nontrivial value of $t_w$. This is a heterogeneity-induced effect that is not observed in homogeneous small-world networks. The optimal $t_w$ increases with the degree of assortativity in the network. Depending on the nature of degree correlations and the elapsed time the walker finds an over/under-estimate of the degree distribution exponent.

12 pages, 3 figures, 1 table, published version

References in corpus (3)

• Power laws, Pareto distributions and Zipf's law
• Self-avoiding walks on scale-free networks
• Random Walks on Complex Networks

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Intermittent search strategies
• Switcher-random-walks: a cognitive-inspired mechanism for network exploration