Effect of assortativity on traffic performance in scale-free networks

Assortativity is an important structural characteristic of complex networks. In this paper, we propose a simple method to generate a network with the desired assortative coefficient but still keep the degree distribution unchanged. We simulate cases with different assortative coefficients and calculate the packet drop probability when the buffer size is limited. The simulation results indicate that assortativity has a significant effect on the traffic performance. Our study helps to understand how the network structure influences the traffic dynamics in complex networks.