Small-world routing

Small-world routing is when you have a lot of people or things to connect with but it's hard to reach them directly. So, you use your friends or connections to help you reach your destination.

Think of it like this: You want to send a letter to your friend who lives across the country, and you don't know their address. However, you have a friend who knows someone who lives near your friend. So, you give the letter to your friend, who gives it to their friend, who then gives it to the person near your friend. That person then delivers your letter to your friend.

This kind of routing is called a small-world network because it's like having a big network where everyone knows everyone else, and there are just a few degrees of separation between any two people or things.

In computer networks, small-world routing is used to find efficient paths between two devices that are not directly connected to each other. For example, if you want to send data from your computer to a server that is located far away, it may have to travel through many different routers and switches to get there. Instead of taking the shortest path, small-world routing algorithms use a combination of direct connections and indirect connections to find the most efficient route. This can help to reduce latency and improve the overall performance of the network.