The Degree Distribution of Thickened Trees

Abstract

We develop a combinatorial structure to serve as model of random real world networks. Starting with plane oriented recursive trees we substitute the nodes by more complex graphs. In such a way we obtain graphs having a global tree-like structure while locally looking clustered. This fits with observations obtained from real-world networks. In particular we show that the resulting graphs are scale-free, that is, the degree distribution has an asymptotic power law.