Random walk on the small-world network model in 3 or more dimensions

Abstract

We study the mixing time of a simple random walk on the small-world network defined by adding edges to $\mathbb{Z}_n^d$ as follows: for each pair $\{x,y\}$ we add an edge with probability $Z_n/\|x-y\|^{d}$ with $Z_n$ chosen so that the average number of added edges to every vertex is $1$. When $d\geq 3$, we show that with high probability the mixing time is of order~$\log n$ and that the random walk does not exhibit cutoff.