Synchronization of the small-world neuronal network with unreliable synapses

Abstract

As is well known, synchronization phenomena are ubiquitous in neuronal systems. Recently a lot of work concerning the synchronization of the neuronal network has been accomplished. In these works, the synapses are usually considered reliable, but experimental results show that, in biological neuronal networks, synapses are usually unreliable. In our previous work, we have studied the synchronization of the neuronal network with unreliable synapses; however, we have not paid attention to the effect of topology on the synchronization of the neuronal network. Several recent studies have found that biological neuronal networks have typical properties of small-world networks, characterized by a short path length and high clustering coefficient. In this work, mainly based on the small-world neuronal network (SWNN) with inhibitory neurons, we study the effect of network topology on the synchronization of the neuronal network with unreliable synapses. Together with the network topology, the effects of the GABAergic reversal potential, time delay and noise are also considered. Interestingly, we found a counter-intuitive phenomenon for the SWNN with specific shortcut adding probability, that is, the less reliable the synapses, the better the synchronization performance of the SWNN. We also consider the effects of both local noise and global noise in this work. It is shown that these two different types of noise have distinct effects on the synchronization: one is negative and the other is positive.