In order to supply better accordance for mod eling and simulation of complex networks, a new degree dependence entropy （DDE） descriptor is proposed to describe the degree dependence relationship and corre sponding characteristic in this paper. First of all, degrees of vertices and the shortest path lengths between all pairs of ,ertices are computed. Then the degree dependence matrices under different shortest path lengths are con structed. At last the DDEs are extracted from the degree dependence matrices. Simulation results show that the DDE descriptor can reflect the complexity of degree dependence relationship in complex networks; high DDE indicates complex degree dependence relationship; low DDE indicates the opposite one. The DDE can be seen as a quantitative statistical characteristic, which is meaningful for networked modeling and simulation.
