Local stability and Hopf bifurcation in small-world delayed networks

The notion of small-world networks, recently introduced by Watts and Strogatz, has attracted increasing interest in studying the interesting properties of complex networks. Notice that, a signal or influence travelling on a small-world network often is associated with time-delay features, which are very common in biological and physical networks. Also, the interactions within nodes in a small-world network are often nonlinear. In this paper, we consider a small-world networks model with nonlinear interactions and time delays, which was recently considered by Yang. By choosing the nonlinear interaction strength as a bifurcation parameter, we prove that Hopf bifurcation occurs. We determine the stability of the bifurcating periodic solutions and the direction of the Hopf bifurcation by applying the normal form theory and the center manifold theorem. Finally, we show a numerical example to verify the theoretical analysis. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.