Navigability of Complex Networks

TL;DR

This paper explores how the structural features of complex networks enable efficient routing without global knowledge, revealing underlying metric spaces that facilitate communication across various natural and manmade systems.

Contribution

It demonstrates that many complex networks inherently support efficient routing through hidden metric spaces, providing a unifying explanation for their navigability.

Findings

Networks possess hidden metric spaces enabling efficient routing.

Structural characteristics support navigation without global information.

Potential applications in Internet routing, social networks, and biological systems.

Abstract

Routing information through networks is a universal phenomenon in both natural and manmade complex systems. When each node has full knowledge of the global network connectivity, finding short communication paths is merely a matter of distributed computation. However, in many real networks nodes communicate efficiently even without such global intelligence. Here we show that the peculiar structural characteristics of many complex networks support efficient communication without global knowledge. We also describe a general mechanism that explains this connection between network structure and function. This mechanism relies on the presence of a metric space hidden behind an observable network. Our findings suggest that real networks in nature have underlying metric spaces that remain undiscovered. Their discovery would have practical applications ranging from routing in the Internet and searching social networks, to studying information flows in neural, gene regulatory networks, or signaling pathways.