A General Approach to Synchronization of Coupled Cells

Abstract

This investigation presents a general framework to establish synchronization of coupled cells and coupled systems. Each individual subsystem is represented by nonlinear differential equations with or without internal or intracellular delay. A general coupling function is employed to depict the communication or interaction between subsystems or cells. Under this framework, the problem of establishing the synchronization for delayed coupled nonlinear systems is transformed to solving a corresponding linear system of algebraic equations. We start by considering a cell-to-cell system under symmetric coupling to present the main idea of the approach. The framework is then extended to the N-cell system under circulant coupling. Delay-dependent, delay-independent, and network-scale-dependent criteria for global synchronization will be established, respectively. The developed scheme can accommodate a wide range of coupled systems. We demonstrate the applications of the present approach to establish synchronization for a gene regulation model, a neuronal model, and some neural networks.