  This paper mainly investigates why small-world networks are navigable and how
to navigate small-world networks. We find that the navigability can naturally
emerge from self-organization in the absence of prior knowledge about
underlying reference frames of networks. Through a process of information
exchange and accumulation on networks, a hidden metric space for navigation on
networks is constructed. Navigation based on distances between vertices in the
hidden metric space can efficiently deliver messages on small-world networks,
in which long range connections play an important role. Numerical simulations
further suggest that high cluster coefficient and low diameter are both
necessary for navigability. These interesting results provide profound insights
into scalable routing on the Internet due to its distributed and localized
requirements.
