Typical distances in a geometric model for complex networks

Abstract

We study typical distances in a geometric random graph on the hyperbolic plane. Introduced by Krioukov et al.~\cite{ar:Krioukov} as a model for complex networks, $N$ vertices are drawn randomly within a bounded subset of the hyperbolic plane and any two of them are joined if they are within a threshold hyperbolic distance. With appropriately chosen parameters, the random graph is sparse and exhibits power law degree distribution as well as local clustering. In this paper we show a further property: the distance between two uniformly chosen vertices that belong to the same component is doubly logarithmic in $N$, i.e., the graph is an ~\emph{ultra-small world}. More precisely, we show that the distance rescaled by $\log \log N$ converges in probability to a certain constant that depends on the exponent of the power law. The same constant emerges in an analogous setting with the well-known \emph{Chung-Lu} model for which the degree distribution has a power law tail.