Continuum Percolation with Unreliable and Spread-Out Connections

We derive percolation results in the continuum plane that lead to what appears to be a general tendency of many stochastic network models. Namely, when the selection mechanism according to which nodes are connected to each other, is sufficiently spread out, then a lower density of nodes, or on average fewer connections per node, are sufficient to obtain an unbounded connected component. We look at two different transformations that spread-out connections and decrease the critical percolation density while preserving the average node degree. Our results indicate that real networks can exploit the presence of spread-out and unreliable connections to achieve connectivity more easily, provided they can maintain the average number of functioning connections per node.