Improving short-term information spreading efficiency in scale-free networks by specifying top large-degree vertices as the initial spreaders.

The positive function of initially influential vertices could be exploited to improve spreading efficiency for short-term spreading in scale-free networks. However, the selection of initial spreaders depends on the specific scenes. The selection of initial spreaders needs to offer low complexity and low power consumption for short-term spreading. In this paper, we propose a selection strategy for efficiently spreading information by specifying a set of top large-degree vertices as the initially informed vertices. The essential idea behind the proposed selection strategy is to exploit the significant diffusion of the top large-degree vertices at the beginning of spreading. To evaluate the positive impact of initially influential vertices, we first build an information spreading model in the Barabási-Albert (BA) scale-free network; next, we design 54 comparative Monte Carlo experiments based on a benchmark strategy and the proposed selection strategy in different BA scale-free network str...