Local rewiring rules for evolving complex networks

Abstract: The effects of link rewiring are considered for the class of directed networks where each node has the same fixed out-degree. We model a network generated by three mechanisms that are present in various networked systems; growth, global rewiring and local rewiring. During a rewiring phase a node is randomly selected, one of its out-going edges is detached from its destination then re-attached to the network in one of two possible ways; either globally to a randomly selected node, or locally to a descendant of a descendant of the originally selected node. Although the probability of attachment to a node increases with its connectivity, the probability of detachment also increases, the result is an exponential degree distribution with a small number of outlying nodes that have extremely large degree. We explain these outliers by identifying the circumstances for which a set of nodes can grow to very high degree.