Deterministic scale-free small-world networks of arbitrary order

In many real-life networks, both the scale-free distribution of degree and small-world behavior are important features. There are many random or deterministic models of networks to simulate these features separately. However, there are few models that combine the scale-free effect and small-world behavior, especially in terms of deterministic versions. What is more, all the existing deterministic algorithms running in the iterative mode generate networks with only several discrete numbers of nodes. This contradicts the purpose of creating a deterministic network model on which we can simulate some dynamical processes as widely as possible. According to these facts, this paper proposes a deterministic network generation algorithm, which can not only generate deterministic networks following a scale-free distribution of degree and small-world behavior, but also produce networks with arbitrary number of nodes. Our scheme is based on a complete binary tree, and each newly generated leaf node is further linked to its full brother and one of its direct ancestors. Analytical computation and simulation results show that the average degree of such a proposed network is less than 5, the average clustering coefficient is high (larger than 0.5, even for a network of size 2 million) and the average shortest path length increases much more slowly than logarithmic growth for the majority of small-world network models.