Merging Complex Networks

In the cyber-physical society, networks are constructed for information transportation. Among them, power law networks with the scale free property are extensively found in self-organized systems. The dynamicity of the cyber-physical society drives large-scale networks keeping interacting and evolving. Several networks can be integrated or merged into one network during the evolving process of the whole cyber-physical society either because they share the same nodes or because one network is trying to connect to the other. A natural question is that in what way two or more networks will merge with each other so that their previous scale-free properties still hold. In this paper, we conducted a set of simulation experiments to study the effects of different merging processes on the degree distribution of merged networks. The result can be used to understand the merging process of complex networks in the cyber-physical society and also can be used to design an integration strategy for multiple networks.