Exploiting the Small-World Effect to Increase Connectivity in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

This paper investigates how the small world concept can be applied in the context of wireless ad hoc networks. Different from wireless ad hoc networks, small world networks have small characteristic path lengths and are highly clustered. This path length reduction is caused by long-range edges between randomly selected nodes. However, in a wireless ad hoc network there are no such long-range connections. Then, we propose to use a fraction of nodes in the network equipped with two radios with different transmission ranges in order to introduce the long-range shortcuts. We analyze the system from a percolation perspective and show that a small fraction of these “special nodes” can improve connectivity in a significant way. We also study the effects of the special nodes on the process of information diffusion and on network robustness.

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