Power law property and self-organization in hybrid ad hoc wireless networks

Abstract

Scale-free property, or what is more commonly referred to as power law node degree distribution, has been observed within several natural and man-made self-organizing complex systems such as the Internet, World Wide Web (WWW), social networks, biological systems, etc. While reasons behind the power law degree distribution, especially in the context of the topology of the Internet, have been explored extensively, and several models to generate topologies that govern the power law property have been proposed, the relationship between the scale-free property and the self-organizing nature of these complex systems has not been clarified yet. In this paper, we explore if scale-free property (also known as power law) is a necessary condition for self-organization, and as a case study, we investigate if the topology of self-organizing wireless networks follow a power law.