Recently, the controllability of complex networks has become a hot topic in the field of network science, where the driver nodes play a key and central role. Therefore, studying their structural characteristics is of great significance to understand the underlying mechanism of network controllability. In this paper, we systematically investigate the nodal centrality of driver nodes in controlling complex networks, we find that the driver nodes tend to be low in-degree but high out-degree nodes, and most of driver nodes tend to have low betweenness centrality but relatively high closeness centrality. We also find that the tendencies of driver nodes towards eigenvector centrality and Katz centrality show very similar behaviors, both high eigenvector centrality and high Katz centrality are avoided by driver nodes. Finally, we find that the driver nodes towards PageRank centrality demonstrate a polarized distribution, i.e., the vast majority of driver nodes tend to be low PageRank nodes whereas only few driver nodes tend to be high PageRank nodes.

The application of complex network theory to power grid analysis has been a hot topic in recent years, which mainly manifests itself in four aspects. The first aspect is to model power system networks. The second aspect is to reveal the topology of the grid itself. The third aspect is to reveal the inherent vulnerability and weakness of the power network itself and put forward the pertinent improvement measures to provide guidance for the construction of power grid. The last aspect is to analyze the mechanism of cascading failure and establish the cascading fault model of large power failure. In the past ten years, by using the complex network theory, many researchers have investigated the structural vulnerability of power grids from the point of view of topology. This letter studies the structural vulnerability of power grids according to the effect of selective node removal. We apply several kinds of node centralities including recently-presented second-order centrality (SOC) to guide the node removal attack. We test the effectiveness of all these centralities in guiding the node removal based on several IEEE power grids. Simulation results show that, compared with other node centralities, the SOC is relatively effective in guiding the node removal and can destroy the power grid with negative degree-degree correlation in less steps.

The scan segmentation method is an efficient solution to deal with the test power problem; However, the use of multiple capture cycles may cause capture violations, thereby leading to fault coverage loss. This issue is much more severe in at-speed testing. In this paper, two scan partition schemes based on complex networks clustering ara proposed to minimize the capture violations without increasing test-data volume and extra area overhead. In the partition process, we use a more accurate notion, spoiled nodes, instead of violation edges to analyse the dependency of flip-flops (ffs), and we use the shortest-path betweenness (SPB) method and the Laplacian-based graph partition method to find the best combination of these flip-flops. Beyond that, the proposed methods can use any given power-unaware set of patterns to test circuits, reducing both shift and capture power in at-speed testing. Extensive experiments have been performed on reference circuit ISCAS89 and IWLS2005 to verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

The power grid defines one of the most important technological networks of our times and has been widely studied as a kind of complex network. It has been developed for more than one century and becomes an extremely huge and seemingly robust system. But it becomes extremely fragile as well because some unexpected minimal failures may lead to sudden and massive blackouts. Many works have been carried out to investigate the structural vulnerability of power grids from the topological point of view based on the complex network theory. This Letter focuses on the structural vulnerability of the power grid under the effect of selective node removal. We propose a new kind of node centrality called overall information centrality (OIC) to guide the node removal attack. We test the effectiveness of our centrality in guiding the node removal based on several IEEE power grids. Simulation results show that, compared with other node centralities such as degree centrality (DC), betweenness centrality (BC) and closeness centrality (CC), our OIC is more effective to guide the node removal and can destroy the power grid in less steps.

The controllability of complex networks has attracted increasing attention within various scientific fields. Many power grids are complex networks with some common topological characteristics such as small-world and scale-free features. This Letter investigate the controllability of some real power grids in comparison with classical complex network models with the same number of nodes. Several conclusions are drawn after detailed analyses using several real power grids together with Erdös-Rényi (ER) random networks, Wattz-Strogatz (WS) small-world networks, Barabási-Albert (BA) scale-free networks and configuration model (CM) networks. The main conclusion is that most driver nodes of power grids are hub-free nodes with low nodal degree values of 1 or 2. The controllability of power grids is determined by degree distribution and heterogeneity, and power grids are harder to control than WS networks and CM networks while easier than BA networks. Some power grids are relatively difficult to control because they require a far higher ratio of driver nodes than ER networks, while other power grids are easier to control for they require a driver node ratio less than or equal to ER random networks.

The relationship between different brain areas is characterized by functional networks through correlations of time series obtained from neuroimaging experiments. Due to its high spatial resolution, functional MRI data is commonly used for generating functional networks of the entire brain. These networks are comprised of the measurement points/channels as nodes and links are established if there is a correlation in the measured time series of these nodes. However, since the evaluation of correlation becomes more accurate with the length of the underlying time series, we construct in this paper functional networks from MEG data, which has a much higher time resolution than fMRI. We study in particular how the network topologies change in an experiment on ambiguity of words, where the subject first receives a priming word before being presented with an ambiguous or unambiguous target word.

Many deterministic small-world network models have been proposed so far, and they have been proven useful in describing some real-life networks which have fixed interconnections. Search efficiency is an important property to characterize small-world networks. This paper tries to clarify how the search procedure behaves when random walks are performed on small-world networks, including the classic WS small-world network and three deterministic small-world network models: the deterministic small-world network created by edge iterations, the tree-structured deterministic small-world network, and the small-world network derived from the deterministic uniform recursive tree. Detailed experiments are carried out to test the search efficiency of various small-world networks with regard to three different types of random walks. From the results, we conclude that the stochastic model outperforms the deterministic ones in terms of average search steps.

Network structures can be found in almost any kind of natural or artificial systems as transport medium for communication between the respective nodes. In this paper we study certain key topological features of brain functional networks obtained from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) measurements. We compare complex network measures of the extracted topologies with those from Internet service providers (ISPs). Our goal is to identify important features which will be helpful in designing more robust and adaptive future information network architectures.

Network structure has a great impact both on hazard spread and network immunization. The vulnerability of the network node is associated with each other, assortative or disassortative. Firstly, an algorithm for vulnerability relevance clustering is proposed to show that the vulnerability community phenomenon is obviously existent in complex networks. On this basis, next, a new indicator called network “hyper-betweenness” is given for evaluating the vulnerability of network node. Network hyper-betweenness can reflect the importance of network node in hazard spread better. Finally, the dynamic stochastic process of hazard spread is simulated based on Monte-Carlo sampling method and a two-player, non-cooperative, constant-sum game model is designed to obtain an equilibrated network immunization strategy.

Recent studies investigating the Internet topology reported that inter Autonomous System (AS) topology exhibits a power-law degree distribution which is known as the scale-free property. Although there are many models to generate scale-free topologies, no game theoretic approaches have been proposed yet. In this paper, we propose the new dynamic game theoretic model for the AS level Internet topology formation. Through numerical simulations, we show our process tends to give emergence of the topologies which have the scale-free property especially in the case of large decay parameters and large random link costs. The significance of our study is summarized as following three topics. Firstly, we show that scale-free topologies can also emerge from the game theoretic model. Secondly, we propose the new dynamic process of the network formation game for modeling a process of AS topology formation, and show that our model is appropriate in the micro and macro senses. In the micro sense, our topology formation process is appropriate because this represents competitive and distributed situation observed in the real AS level Internet topology formation process. In the macro sense, some of statistical properties of emergent topologies from our process are similar to those of which also observed in the real AS level Internet topology. Finally, we demonstrate the numerical simulations of our process which is deterministic variation of dynamic process of network formation game with transfers. This is also the new result in the field of the game theory.