Small-world networks empowered large machine-to-machine communications

Cloud-based machine-to-machine communications emerge to facilitate services through linkage between cyber and physical worlds. In addition to great challenges in a large network of machine/sensor swarm, effective network architecture involving interconnection of wireless infrastructure and multi-hop ad hoc networking in the machine swarm remains open. Inspired by the small-world phenomenon in social networks, we may establish a short-cut path under a heterogeneous network architecture through wireless infrastructure and cloud, by connecting to data aggregators or access points in the machine swarm, such that end-to-end delay can be significantly reduced. Our mathematical analysis on network diameter and average delay, along with verifications by simulations, demonstrate spectral and energy efficiency of our proposed heterogeneous network architecture in large machine-to-machine communication networks.