Optimization in Networks

The recent surge in the network modeling of complex systems has set the stage for a new era in the study of fundamental and applied aspects of optimization in collective behavior. This Focus Issue presents an extended view of the state of the art in this field and includes articles from a large variety of domains where optimization manifests itself, including physical, biological, social, and technological networked systems.Comment: Opening article of the CHAOS Focus Issue "Optimization in Networks", available at http://link.aip.org/link/?CHA/17/2/htmlto

Congestion-gradient driven transport on complex networks

We present a study of transport on complex networks with routing based on local information. Particles hop from one node of the network to another according to a set of routing rules with different degrees of congestion awareness, ranging from random diffusion to rigid congestion-gradient driven flow. Each node can be either source or destination for particles and all nodes have the same routing capacity, which are features of ad-hoc wireless networks. It is shown that the transport capacity increases when a small amount of congestion awareness is present in the routing rules, and that it then decreases as the routing rules become too rigid when the flow becomes strictly congestion-gradient driven. Therefore, an optimum value of the congestion awareness exists in the routing rules. It is also shown that, in the limit of a large number of nodes, networks using routing based on local information jam at any nonzero load. Finally, we study the correlation between congestion at node level and a betweenness centrality measure.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figure