Small-World Networks: From Theoretical Bounds to Practical Systems

Abstract

In small-world networks, each peer is connected to its closest neighbors in the network topology, as well as to additional long-range contact(s), also called shortcut(s). In 2000, Kleinberg provided asymptotic lower bounds on routing performances and showed that greedy routing in an n-peer small-world network performs in $\Omega(n^\frac{1}{3})$ steps when the distance to shortcuts is chosen uniformly at random, and in Θ(log² n) when the distance to shortcuts is chosen according to a harmonic distribution in a d-dimensional mesh. Yet, we observe through experimental results that peer to peer gossip-based protocols achieving small-world topologies where shortcuts are randomly chosen, perform reasonably well in practice.

Kleinberg results are relevant for extremely large systems while systems considered in practice are usually of smaller size (they are typically made up of less than one million of peers). This paper explores the impact of Kleinberg results in the context of practical systems and small-world networks. More precisely, based on the observation that, despite the fact that the routing complexity of gossip-based small-world overlay networks is not polylogarithmic (as proved by Kleinberg), this type of networks ultimately provide reasonable results in practice. This leads us to think that the asymptotic big O() complexity alone might not always be sufficient to assess the practicality of a system whose size is typically smaller that what the one theory targets. The paper consequently proposes a refined routing complexity measure for small-world networks (namely, a recurrence formula that can be easily computed). Yet, given that Kleinberg proved that the distribution of shortcuts has a strong impact on the routing complexity (when extremely large networks are considered), arises the question of leveraging this result to improve upon current gossip-based protocols. We show that gossip-based protocols (designed for less than one million of peers) can benefit from a good approximation of Kleinberg-like small-world topologies (designed for extremely large networks). Along, are presented simulation results that demonstrate the relevance of the proposed approach.