Scale-Free Wireless Networks with Limited Degree Information

According to the complex network theory, scale-free networks have many advantages in terms of connectivity, energy efficiency, etc. However, it has been considered infeasible to make wireless networks scale-free while satisfying the inherent constraint on limited feedback of wireless communications. In this paper, we propose two efficient protocols to make wireless networks scale-free. We show that the proposed protocols, i.e., preferential attachment with a time-varying feedback threshold and opportunistic two-stage random attachment, can efficiently construct scale-free networks with marginal amount of feedback. Moreover, contrary to conventional knowledge that random attachment cannot construct a scale-free network, we first show that a scale-free network can be established by the proposed random attachment.