Random spread on the family of small-world networks.

We present analytical and numerical results of a random walk on the family of small-world graphs. The average access time shows a crossover from regular to random behavior with increasing distance from the starting point of the random walk. We introduce an independent step approximation, which enables us to obtain analytic results for the average access time. We observe a scaling relation for the average access time in the degree of the nodes. The behavior of the average access time as a function of p shows striking similarity with that of the characteristic length of the graph. This observation may have important applications in routing and switching in networks with a large number of nodes.