Human navigation has been a topic of interest in spatial cognition from the past few decades. It has been experimentally observed that humans accomplish the task of way-finding a destination in an unknown environment by recognizing landmarks. Investigations using network analytic techniques reveal that humans, when asked to way-find their destination, learn the top ranked nodes of a network. In this paper we report a study simulating the strategy used by humans to recognize the centers of a network. We show that the paths obtained from our simulation has the same properties as the paths obtained in human based experiment. The simulation thus performed leads to a novel way of path-finding in a network. We discuss the performance of our method and compare it with the existing techniques to find a path between a pair of nodes in a network.
On the application front, such navigational techniques are useful in a problem of finding paths between vertices in peer-to-peer systems. , @cite_27 in their work on routing indices on Peer-to-Peer systems, propose a novel method of query forwarding from vertices to their neighbors that are more likely to have answers. They provide different novel routing schemes and evaluate their performance.
@cite_27
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Finding information in a peer-to-peer system currently requires either a costly and vulnerable central index, or flooding the network with queries. We introduce the concept of routing indices (RIs), which allow nodes to forward queries to neighbors that are more likely to have answers. If a node cannot answer a query, it forwards the query to a subset of its neighbors, based on its local RI, rather than by selecting neighbors at random or by flooding the network by forwarding the query to all neighbors. We present three RI schemes: the compound, the hop-count, and the exponential routing indices. We evaluate their performance via simulations, and find that RIs can improve performance by one or two orders of magnitude vs. a flooding-based system, and by up to 100 vs. a random forwarding system. We also discuss the tradeoffs between the different RI schemes and highlight the effects of key design variables on system performance.