Mathematical Problems in Engineering
Volume 2012 (2012), Article ID 302786, 13 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/302786
Review Article

Visiting Power Laws in Cyber-Physical Networking Systems

Ming Li1 and Wei Zhao2

1School of Information Science & Technology, East China Normal University, No. 500, Dong-Chuan Road, Shanghai 200241, China
2Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Macau, Avenue Padre Tomas Pereira, Taipa 1356, Macau SAR, China

Received 23 February 2011; Accepted 23 March 2011

Academic Editor: Carlo Cattani

Copyright © 2012 Ming Li and Wei Zhao. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Cyber-physical networking systems (CPNSs) are made up of various physical systems that are heterogeneous in nature. Therefore, exploring universalities in CPNSs for either data or systems is desired in its fundamental theory. This paper is in the aspect of data, aiming at addressing that power laws may yet be a universality of data in CPNSs. The contributions of this paper are in triple folds. First, we provide a short tutorial about power laws. Then, we address the power laws related to some physical systems. Finally, we discuss that power-law-type data may be governed by stochastically differential equations of fractional order. As a side product, we present the point of view that the upper bound of data flow at large-time scaling and the small one also follows power laws.