A Review on Node-Matching Between Networks

The relationships between individuals in various systems are always described by networks. Recently, the quick development of computer science makes it possible to study the structures of those super-complex networks in many areas including sociology (Xuan et al., 2009; Xuan, Du & Wu, 2010a), biology (Barabási & Oltvai, 2004; Eguíluz et al., 2005), physics (Dorogovtsev et al., 2008; Rozenfeld et al., 2010), etc., by the tools in graph theory. Interestingly, it was revealed that many of these complex networks in various areas present several similar topological properties, such as small-world (Watts & Strogatz, 1998), scale-free (Barabási & Albert, 1999), self-similarity (Motter et al., 2003), symmetry (Xiao et al., 2008), etc. In order to explain these properties, a large number of models have been proposed (Barabási & Albert, 1999; Li & Chen, 2003;Mossa et al., 2002;Watts & Strogatz, 1998; Xiao et al., 2008; Xuan, Du, Wu & Chen, 2010; Xuan et al., 2006; 2007; 2008). However, most of current researches still focus on understanding the relationships between individuals in a single system, while the inter-system relationships are always ignored.