A Review of Recent Studies of Geographical Scale-Free Networks

The scale-free (SF) structures that commonly appear in many complex networks are a hot topic in social, biological, and information sciences. These self-organized generation mechanisms are expected to be useful for efficient communication or robust connectivity in sociotechnological infrastructures. This paper is the first review of geographical SF network models. We discuss the essential generation mechanisms for inducing the structures with power-law behavior, and consider the properties of planarity and link length. Distributed design of geographical SF networks without the crossing and long-range links that cause interference and dissipation problems is very important for many applications such as communications, power grids, and sensor systems