Structure and control of self-sustained target waves in excitable small-world networks

摘要

Small-world networks describe many important practical systems among whichneural networks consisting of excitable nodes are the most typical ones. Inthis paper we study self-sustained oscillations of target waves in excitablesmall-world networks. A novel dominant phase-advanced driving (DPAD) method,which is generally applicable for analyzing all oscillatory complex networksconsisting of nonoscillatory nodes, is proposed to reveal the self-organizedstructures supporting this type of oscillations. The DPAD method explicitlyexplores the oscillation sources and wave propagation paths of the systems,which are otherwise deeply hidden in the complicated patterns of randomlydistributed target groups. Based on the understanding of the self-organizedstructure, the oscillatory patterns can be controlled with extremely highefficiency.