Attack vulnerability of scale-free networks due to cascading failures

Jianwei Wang, Lili Rong, Liang Zhang and Zhongzhi Zhang

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2008, vol. 387, issue 26, 6671-6678

Abstract: In this paper, adopting the initial load of a node i to be akiα with ki being the degree of the node i, we propose a cascading model based on a load local redistribution rule and examine cascading failures on the typical network, i.e., the BA network with the scale-free property. We find that the BA scale-free network reaches the strongest robustness level in the case of α=1 and the robustness of the network has a positive correlation with the average degree 〈k〉, where the robustness is quantified by a transition from normal state to collapse. In addition, we further discuss the effects of two different attacks for the robustness against cascading failures on our cascading model and find an interesting result, i.e., the effects of two different attacks, strongly depending to the value α. These results may be very helpful for real-life networks to avoid cascading-failure-induced disasters.

Keywords: Cascading failure; Scale-free network; Attack; Critical threshold (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (37)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:387:y:2008:i:26:p:6671-6678

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2008.08.037

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