Optimal Path and Minimal Spanning Trees in Random Weighted Networks

TL;DR

This paper reviews the scaling behavior of optimal paths and minimal spanning trees in random weighted networks, highlighting the effects of disorder strength and network type on path length and network structure.

Contribution

It introduces a universal scaling parameter for optimal path lengths and analyzes the composition of minimum spanning trees into superhighways and roads.

Findings

Optimal path length scales logarithmically in weak disorder.

Strong disorder destroys small-world properties in ER and SF networks.

MST consists of percolation clusters connected by a scale-free tree.

Abstract

We review results on the scaling of the optimal path length in random networks with weighted links or nodes. In strong disorder we find that the length of the optimal path increases dramatically compared to the known small world result for the minimum distance. For Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi (ER) and scale free networks (SF), with parameter $\lambda$ ($\lambda >3$), we find that the small-world nature is destroyed. We also find numerically that for weak disorder the length of the optimal path scales logaritmically with the size of the networks studied. We also review the transition between the strong and weak disorder regimes in the scaling properties of the length of the optimal path for ER and SF networks and for a general distribution of weights, and suggest that for any distribution of weigths, the distribution of optimal path lengths has a universal form which is controlled by the scaling parameter $Z=\ell_{\infty}/A$ where $A$ plays the role of the disorder strength, and $\ell_{\infty}$ is the length of the optimal path in strong disorder. The relation for $A$ is derived analytically and supported by numerical simulations. We then study the minimum spanning tree (MST) and show that it is composed of percolation clusters, which we regard as "super-nodes", connected by a scale-free tree. We furthermore show that the MST can be partitioned into two distinct components. One component the {\it superhighways}, for which the nodes with high centrality dominate, corresponds to the largest cluster at the percolation threshold which is a subset of the MST. In the other component, {\it roads}, low centrality nodes dominate. We demonstrate the significance identifying the superhighways by showing that one can improve significantly the global transport by improving a very small fraction of the network.