This paper describes the design, realization and use of an analogical, fully reconfigurable experimental setup to analyze the complex dynamics of networks of chaotic circuits. It reports details of the implementation and characterization of the setup, together with representative results, showing its flexibility and potential. The setup allows to choose arbitrarily the coupling strength and interconnection structure among the circuits, the type of link and to select the parameters of the node dynamics. It has a modular structure, and it can accommodate up to 32 nodes interconnected by at most 32 links. The collective dynamics of a relatively large set of different network structures and configurations has been investigated using the setup. Synchronization, pattern formation and other interesting collective phenomena were observed experimentally, their evidence being reported here as an illustration of the potential of the proposed setup.
Complex networks with linear diffusive coupling functionAs discussed at the beginning of this section, a complex network is mostly defined by the interconnection structure among its elementary dynamical units. As commonly done in the literature, 1552 M. DE MAGISTRIS ET AL.Figure 6. An example of synchronized chaotic dynamics for the case of 16 nodes, ring topology: (a) v C1 traces; (b) state plane v C1 -v C2 for each node; (c) synchronization diagrams v C11 -v C1k .