Correlated multiplexity and connectivity of multiplex random networks

Abstract

Nodes in a complex networked system often engage in more than one type of interactions among them; they form a multiplex network with multiple types of links. In real-world complex systems, a node's degree for one type of links and that for the other are not randomly distributed but correlated, which we term correlated multiplexity. In this paper, we study a simple model of multiplex random networks and demonstrate that the correlated multiplexity can drastically affect the properties of a giant component in the network. Specifically, when the degrees of a node for different interactions in a duplex Erdos-Renyi network are maximally correlated, the network contains the giant component for any nonzero link density. In contrast, when the degrees of a node are maximally anti-correlated, the emergence of the giant component is significantly delayed, yet the entire network becomes connected into a single component at a finite link density. We also discuss the mixing patterns and the cases with imperfect correlated multiplexity.