Network coherence generally refers to the emergence of simple aggregated dynamical behaviours, despite heterogeneity in the dynamics of the subsystems that constitute the network. In this paper, we develop a general frequency domain framework to analyze and quantify the level of network coherence that a system exhibits by relating coherence with a low-rank property of the system’s input-output response. More precisely, for a networked system with linear dynamics and coupling, we show that, as the network’s \empheffective algebraic connectivity grows, the system transfer matrix converges to a rank-one transfer matrix representing the coherent behavior. Interestingly, the non-zero eigenvalue of such a rank-one matrix is given by the harmonic mean of individual nodal dynamics, and we refer to it as the coherent dynamics. Our analysis unveils the frequency-dependent nature of coherence and a non-trivial interplay between dynamics and network topology. We further show that many networked systems can exhibit similar coherent behavior by establishing a concentration result in a setting with randomly chosen individual nodal dynamics.
