Real-world Machine-to-Machine (M2M) networks comprise of power-constrained sensor nodes to collect data of interest and send it to data aggregators for further processing using multi-hop relaying which increases end-to-end transmission delay. However, in many real-world application scenarios such as low latency communication in a 5G network, there is a strict delay deadline that has to be met. In this paper, we propose Constrained Link Addition Using high Sensor nodes (CLAUSe) to efficiently construct a few long-ranged links among the chosen high sensor nodes (sensor nodes with at least two interfaces) to reduce end-to-end hop distance in a sparse random M2M network setting, thereby, incorporating the small-world characteristics. © 2020 IEEE.