Geographical effect on small-world network synchronization

We investigate the geographical effect on the synchronization of small-world oscillator networks. We construct small-world geographical networks by randomly adding links to one- and two-dimensional regular lattices, and we find that the synchronizability is a nonmonotonic function of both the coupling strength and the geographical distance of randomly added shortcuts. Our findings demonstrate that the geographical effect plays an important role in network synchronization, which may shed some light on the study of collective dynamics of complex networks.