Country neighborhood network on territory and its geometrical model

The country neighborhood network, where nodes represent countries and two nodes are considered linked if the corresponding countries are neighbors on territory, is created and its giant component, the Asia, Europe, and Africa (AEA) cluster, is carefully studied in this paper. It is found that, as common, the degree distribution and the clustering function of the AEA cluster are both compatible with scale-free property, besides, the AEA cluster presents a little disassortativity, and its near power-law country area-degree relationship with the exponent close to 1.7 may imply a fractal dimension close to 1.2 of country borderlines in the AEA continent. It is also revealed that the average difference of population density between two countries obeys an approximately increasing function of the shortest path length between them, which may suggest a gradual consensus of population density in the AEA cluster. A simple unity rule is then adopted to model the AEA cluster and such model explains the AEA cluster very well in most aspects, e.g., power-law domain area distribution and fractal domain borderlines, etc., except that the network derived by the model has stronger disassortativity, which may be explained by the fact that, in the evolution history of countries, unbalanced neighbors are more likely to be united as one than balanced neighbors. Additionally, the network evolving process can be divided into three periods, defined as formation period, growth period, and combination period, and there are indications that the AEA cluster is in its third period.