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 socio-technological 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.