Network connection strengths: Another power-law?

Abstract

It has been discovered recently that many social, biological and ecological systems have the so-called small-world and scale-free features, which has provoked new research interest in the studies of various complex networks. Yet, most network models studied thus far are binary, with the linking strengths being either 0 or 1, while which are best described by weighted-linking networks, in which the vertices interact with each other with varying strengths. Here we found that the distribution of connection strengths of scientific collaboration networks decays also in a power-law form and we conjecture that all weighted-linking networks of this type follow the same distribution.