We investigate the potential of scale-free networks as error-correctingcodes. We find that irregular low-density parity-check codes with highestperformance known to date have degree distributions well fitted by a power-lawfunction $p(k)\sim k^{-\gamma}$ with $\gamma$ close to 2, which suggests thatcodes built on scale-free networks with appropriate power exponents can be gooderror-correcting codes, with performance possibly approaching the Shannonlimit. We demonstrate for an erasure channel that codes with power-law degreedistribution of the form $p(k)=C(k+\alpha)^{-\gamma}$, with $k \geq 2$ andsuitable selection of the parameters $\alpha$ and $\gamma$, indeed have verygood error-correction capabilities.
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