On the emergence of islands in complex networks (Q2012835)

Summary: Most growth models for complex networks consider networks comprising a single connected block or island, which contains all the nodes in the network. However, it has been demonstrated that some large complex networks have more than one island, with an\textit{island size distribution} (\(I_s\)) obeying a power-law function \(I_s \sim s^{- \alpha}\). This paper introduces a growth model that considers the emergence of islands as the network grows. The proposed model addresses the following two features: (i) the probability that a new island is generated decreases as the network grows and (ii) new islands are created with a constant probability at any stage of the growth. In the first case, the model produces an \textit{island size distribution} that decays as a power-law \(I_s \sim s^{- \alpha}\) with a fixed exponent \(\alpha = 1\) and in-degree distribution that decays as a power-law \(Q_i \sim i^{- \gamma}\) with \(\gamma = 2\). When the second case is considered, the model describes island size and in-degree distributions that decay as a power-law with \(2 < \alpha < \infty\) and \(2 < \gamma < \infty\), respectively.