Traffic-driven model of the World Wide Web graph

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.