Smallest small-world network

Abstract

Efficiency in passage times is an important issue in designing networks, such as transportation or computer networks. The small-world networks have structures that yield high efficiency, while keeping the network highly clustered. We show that among all networks with the small-world structure, the most efficient ones have a single ``center'', from which all shortcuts are connected to uniformly distributed nodes over the network. The networks with several centers and a connected subnetwork of shortcuts are shown to be ``almost'' as efficient. Genetic-algorithm simulations further support our results.