A Method for Improving Complex Network Capacity Based on Betweenness Centrality

The importance of nodes in the scale-free networks such as the Internet varies drastically. The few core nodes will easily become the bottlenecks of network capacity. Betweenness Centrality is introduced here to optimize network topology and identify nodes which are most likely to cause congestion. Through some theoretical analysis and experiments, the paper figures out the relationships between the network capacity and the variations of the nodes' Betweenness, the sum of the nodes' Betweenness, the shortest path length between two nodes and the number of the core nodes by which the shortest path passes. At last the paper proposes some methods to add some shortcuts in the scale-free networks according to Betweenness and the variation of Betweenness. This can easily balance the load among the core nodes, relieve congestion efficiently and increase the capacity of the network substantially.