Full Synchronization Studied by a Set of Partitions Connected Together

Abstract

A novel approach is brought forward for synchronization of a clustered network in this paper, the objective of which is twofold. The first one is to study cluster synchronization by analyzing the inner coupling matrices of the individual clusters instead of the one of the whole network. The other is to show that full synchronization can be ensured by several types of cluster synchronization, the partitions of which are connected together. Compared with the classical method for full synchronization, our approach reduces the network size to the cluster size and additionally obtains the thresholds for different types of cluster synchronization. As a numerical example, cluster and full synchronization in a special clustered network are investigated through our approach. It turns out that we obtain the same threshold for full synchronization as the one obtained by the classical method. Numerical simulations confirm the validity of our approach.