Abstract
Motivated by the empirical analysis of the air transportation system, we define a network model that includes geographical attributes along with topological and weight (traffic) properties. The introduction of geographical attributes is made by constraining the network in real space. Interestingly, the inclusion of geometrical features induces non-trivial correlations between the weights, the connectivity pattern and the actual spatial distances of vertices. The model also recovers the emergence of anomalous fluctuations in the betweenness-degree correlation function as first observed by Guimerà and Amaral (2004 Eur. Phys. J. B 38 381). The presented results suggest that the interplay between weight dynamics and spatial constraints is a key ingredient in order to understand the formation of real-world weighted networks.