Eur. Phys. J. D 56, 221-229 (2010)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2009-00296-0

Geographical effect on weighted network synchronisation

¹ Basic Course Department, Suzhou Polytechnical Institute of Agriculture, Suzhou, Jiangsu 215004, P.R. China
² School of Physical Science and Technology, Suzhou University, Suzhou, Jiangsu 215006, P.R. China

Corresponding authors: niyun@mail.szai.com liangwu@suda.edu.cn szhu@suda.edu.cn

Received: 6 July 2009
Revised: 21 September 2009
Published online: 24 November 2009

Abstract

The propensity for synchronisation of weighted and asymmetrical networks is investigated. The weighting scheme is employed when connection strengths are weighted according to local information. The weighting schemes of different level of information restriction are compared. It is found that the optimal network synchronisability is obtained when the weighting scheme is based on softly restricted information. It is even better than schemes based on global information. This implies that “more knowledge, better network synchronisability” is not always true. This is mainly due to a partial synchronisation phenomenon taking place at a cluster level. The finding may be helpful to gain a better understanding of why synchronisation is widely observed in many real large-scale systems while each node is aware of limited information about only a small part of a network.