Box-covering algorithm for fractal dimension of complex networks.

The self-similarity of complex networks is typically investigated through computational algorithms, the primary task of which is to cover the structure with a minimal number of boxes. Here we introduce a box-covering algorithm that outperforms previous ones in most cases. For the two benchmark cases tested, namely, the E. coli and the World Wide Web (WWW) networks, our results show that the improvement can be rather substantial, reaching up to 15% in the case of the WWW network.