Synchronization on overlapping community network

In this paper, we propose a simple random network model with overlapping communities controlled by several parameters, and investigate the influence of the overlapping community structure on the synchronization behavior under different parameters. It is found that the synchronizability of the network is mainly influenced by the overlapping size of the communities and the connectivity density of the overlapped group to the other interrelated communities, and has nothing to do with the intra-connectivity of the overlapped group. In addition, it is found that the highly interconnected communities can be almost synchronized in a given time scale, whereas the overlapped group is far from synchronization. Furthermore, the instantaneous frequencies of the nodes in the communities and their overlapped group are also investigated, which show that the nodes in the overlapped group will exhibit a remarkable oscillation with a weighted mean frequency of the other correlative communities. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.