  We consider the question of determining how the topological structure
influences a consensus dynamical process taking place on a network. By
considering a large dataset of real-world networks we first determine that the
removal of edges according to their communicability angle -an angle between
position vectors of the nodes in an Euclidean communicability space- increases
the average time of consensus by a factor of 5.68 in real-world networks. The
edge betweenness centrality also identifies -in a smaller proportion- those
critical edges for the consensus dynamics, i.e., its removal increases the time
of consensus by a factor of 3.70. We justify theoretically these findings on
the basis of the role played by the algebraic connectivity and the
isoperimetric number of networks on the dynamical process studied, and their
connections with the properties mentioned before. Finally, we study the role
played by global topological parameters of networks on the consensus dynamics.
We determine that the network density and the average distance-sum -an
analogous of the node degree for shortest-path distances, account for more than
80% of the variance of the average time of consensus in the real-world networks
studied.
