Self-organized Emergence of Navigability on Small-World Networks

TL;DR

This paper explains how navigability naturally emerges in small-world networks through self-organization, enabling efficient message routing without prior knowledge, by constructing a hidden metric space from information exchange.

Contribution

It reveals that navigability arises from self-organized processes and introduces a hidden metric space concept for efficient routing in small-world networks.

Findings

Navigability emerges from self-organization without prior knowledge.

A hidden metric space facilitates efficient navigation.

High clustering and low diameter are crucial for navigability.

Abstract

This paper mainly investigates why small-world networks are navigable and how to navigate small-world networks. We find that the navigability can naturally emerge from self-organization in the absence of prior knowledge about underlying reference frames of networks. Through a process of information exchange and accumulation on networks, a hidden metric space for navigation on networks is constructed. Navigation based on distances between vertices in the hidden metric space can efficiently deliver messages on small-world networks, in which long range connections play an important role. Numerical simulations further suggest that high cluster coefficient and low diameter are both necessary for navigability. These interesting results provide profound insights into scalable routing on the Internet due to its distributed and localized requirements.