Hyperbolic trees for efficient routing computation

Complex system theory is increasingly applied to develop control protocols for distributed computational and networking resources. The paper deals with the important subproblem of finding complex connected structures having excellent navigability properties using limited computational resources. Recently, the two-dimensional hyperbolic space turned out to be an efficient geometry for generative models of complex networks. The networks generated using the hyperbolic metric space share their basic structural properties (like small diameter or scale-free degree distribution) with several real networks. In the paper, a new model is proposed for generating navigation trees for complex networks embedded in the two-dimensional hyperbolic plane. The generative model is not based on known hyperbolic network models: the trees are not inferred from the existing links of any network; they are generated from scratch instead and based purely on the hyperbolic coordinates of nodes. We show that these hyperbolic trees have scale-free degree distributions and are present to a large extent both in synthetic hyperbolic complex networks and real ones (Internet autonomous system topology, US flight network) embedded in the hyperbolic plane. As the main result, we show that routing on the generated hyperbolic trees is optimal in terms of total memory usage of forwarding tables.