Walks on Apollonian networks

Abstract

We carry out comparative studies of random walks on deterministic Apollonian networks (DANs) and random Apollonian networks (RANs). We perform computer simulations for the mean first passage time, the average return time, the mean-square displacement, and the network coverage for unrestricted random walk. The diffusions both on DANs and RANs are proved to be sublinear. The search efficiency for walks with various strategies and the influence of the topology of underlying networks on the dynamics of walks are discussed. Contrary to one's intuition, it is shown that the self-avoiding random walk, which has been verified as an optimal strategy for searching on scale-free and small-world networks, is not the best strategy for the DAN in the thermodynamic limit.