The clustering coefficient and the diameter of small-world networks

Abstract

The small-world network, proposed by Watts and Strogatz, has been extensively studied for the past over ten years. In this paper, a generalized small-world network is proposed, which extends several small-world network models. Furthermore, some properties of a special type of generalized small-world network with given expectation of edge numbers have been investigated, such as the degree distribution and the isoperimetric number. These results are used to present a lower and an upper bounds for the clustering coefficient and the diameter of the given edge number expectation generalized small-world network, respectively. In other words, we prove mathematically that the given edge number expectation generalized small-world network possesses large clustering coefficient and small diameter.