Spiking regularity in a noisy small-world neuronal network Original Research Article

The regularity of spiking oscillations is studied in the networks with different topological structures. The network is composed of coupled Fitz-Hugh–Nagumo neurons driven by colored noise. The investigation illustrates that the spike train in both the regular and the Watts–Strogatz small-world neuronal networks can show the best regularity at a moderate noise intensity, indicating the existence of coherence resonance. Moreover, the temporal coherence of the spike train in the small-world network is superior to that in a regular network due to the increase of the randomness of the network topology. Besides the noise intensity, the spiking regularity can be optimized by tuning the randomness of the network topological structure or by tuning the correlation time of the colored noise. In particular, under the cooperation of the small-world topology and the correlation time, the spike train with good regularity could sustain a large magnitude of the local noise.