Driving interconnected networks to supercriticality

Abstract

Networks in the real world do not exist as isolated entities, but they are often part of more complicated structures composed of many interconnected network layers. Recent studies have shown that such mutual dependence makes real networked systems potentially exposed to atypical structural and dynamical behaviors, and thus there is an urgent necessity to better understand the mechanisms at the basis of these anomalies. Previous research has mainly focused on the emergence of atypical properties in relation to the moments of the intra- and interlayer degree distributions. In this paper, we show that an additional ingredient plays a fundamental role for the possible scenario that an interconnected network can face: the correlation between intra- and interlayer degrees. For sufficiently high amounts of correlation, an interconnected network can be tuned, by varying the moments of the intra- and interlayer degree distributions, in distinct topological and dynamical regimes. When instead the correlation between intraand interlayer degrees is lower than a critical value, the system enters in a supercritical regime where dynamical and topological phases are no longer distinguishable.