A Review of Recent Studies of Geographical Scale-Free Networks

The scale-free (SF) structure that commonly appears in many complex networks is one of the hot topics related to social, biological, and information sciences. The 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 to induce the structure with power-law behavior and the properties of planarity and link length. The distributed designs of geographical SF networks without the crossing and long-range links that cause the interference and dissipation problems are very important for many applications such as in the Internet, power-grid, mobile, and sensor systems.