Article,
Networks and Networking - A Statistical Physics Perspective
CoRR, (2011)
Abstract
Efficient networking in communication systems, both wired and wireless, has a substantial
economic and societal impact. While communication networks become increasingly more
complex, the ever increasing demand for higher transmission volume, quality of service,
robustness and reduced energy consumption require new tools and methods to meet these
conflicting pressures. The new methodology should serve for gaining better understanding
of the properties of these networks at the macroscopic level, as well as for the development of
new principled optimization and management algorithms at the microscopic level. Methods
of statistical physics seem the best place to start the search for new approaches as they
have been developed specifically to deal with non-linear large scale systems. This review
aims at presenting an overview of tools that have been developed within the statistical
physics community and that can be readily applied to address the emerging problems
in networking. As network properties are at the heart of networking, we dedicate part
of the review to introduce and briefly define particular network topologies of interest.
We then review dynamic processes, primarily related to random walks on networks, and
their use in the exploration of networks structure and vulnerability. Methods that have
been developed within the physics community of disordered systems and their relation
to probabilistic inference techniques are also reviewed and their relevance to the area of
networking is presented.
