Enumeration of spanning trees in a pseudofractal scale-free web

¹ School of Computer Science, Fudan University - Shanghai 200433, China
² Shanghai Key Lab of Intelligent Information Processing, Fudan University - Shanghai 200433, China

^* zhangzz@fudan.edu.cn ^** sgzhou@fudan.edu.cn

Received: 11 May 2010
Accepted: 9 June 2010

Abstract

Spanning trees are an important quantity characterizing the reliability of a network, however, explicitly determining the number of spanning trees in networks is a theoretical challenge. In this paper, we study the number of spanning trees in a small-world scale-free network and obtain the exact expressions. We find that the entropy of spanning trees in the studied network is less than 1, which is in sharp contrast to previous result for the regular lattice with the same average degree, the entropy of which is higher than 1. Thus, the number of spanning trees in the scale-free network is much less than that of the corresponding regular lattice. We present that this difference lies in disparate structure of the two networks. Since scale-free networks are more robust than regular networks under random attack, our result can lead to the counterintuitive conclusion that a network with more spanning trees may be relatively unreliable.