Eur. Phys. J. B 72, 641-655 (2009)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2009-00411-1

On the critical packet injection rate of a preferential next-nearest neighbor routing traffic model on Barabási-Albert networks

Department of Physics, and Center of Theoretical and Computational Physics, University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong

Corresponding author: ^a hfchau@hkusua.hku.hk

Received: 4 June 2009
Revised: 27 September 2009
Published online: 4 December 2009

Abstract

Recently, Yin et al. [Eur. Phys. J. B 49, 205 (2006)] introduced an efficient small-world network traffic model using preferential next-nearest neighbor routing strategy with the so-called path iteration avoidance (PIA) rule to study the jamming transition of internet. Here we study their model without PIA rule by a mean-field analysis which carefully divides the message packets into two types. Then, we argue that our mean-field analysis is also applicable in the presence of PIA rule in the limit of a large number of nodes in the network. Our analysis gives an explicit expression of the critical packet injection rate R_c as a function of a bias parameter of the routing strategy α in their model with or without PIA rule. In particular, we predict a sudden change in R_c at a certain value of α. These predictions agree quite well with our extensive computer simulations.