Cluster synchronization in nonlinearly coupled delayed networks of non-identical dynamic systems

In the real world, many networks show community structure, i.e., clusters of nodes, which have a high density of links within the same cluster but a lower density of links between different clusters. In this paper, nonlinearly coupled networks with community structure and non-identical nodes and with time-varying delay are considered. By applying pinning control to a fraction of network nodes, and using a suitable Lyapunov function, we obtain some new and useful synchronization criteria, which guarantee that various clusters are synchronized independently. An example is presented to show the application of the criteria obtained in this paper. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.