Scaling of mean first-passage time as efficiency measure of nodes sending information on scale-free Koch networks

Random walks on complex networks, especially scale-free networks, have attracted considerable interest in the past few years. A lot of previous work showed that the average receiving time (ART), i.e., the average of mean first-passage time (MFPT) for random walks to a given hub node (node with maximum degree) averaged over all starting points in scale-free small-world networks exhibits a sublinear or linear dependence on network order N (number of nodes), which indicates that hub nodes are very efficient in receiving information if one looks upon the random walker as an information messenger. Thus far, the efficiency of a hub node sending information on scale-free small-world networks has not been addressed yet. In this paper, we study random walks on the class of Koch networks with scale-free behavior and small-world effect. We derive some basic properties for random walks on the Koch network family, based on which we calculate analytically the average sending time (AST) defined as the average of MFPTs from a hub node to all other nodes, excluding the hub itself. The obtained closed-form expression displays that in large networks the AST grows with network order as N ln N, which is larger than the linear scaling of ART to the hub from other nodes. On the other hand, we also address the case with the information sender distributed uniformly among the Koch networks, and derive analytically the global mean first-passage time, namely, the average of MFPTs between all couples of nodes, the leading scaling of which is identical to that of AST. From the obtained results, we present that although hub nodes are more efficient for receiving information than other nodes, they display a qualitatively similar speed for sending information as non-hub nodes. Moreover, we show that that AST from a starting point (sender) to all possible targets is not sensitively affected by the sender’s location. The present findings are helpful for better understanding random walks performed on scale-free small-world networks.