Improving network robustness by edge modification

Alina Beygelzimer, Geoffrey Grinstein, Ralph Linsker and Irina Rish

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2005, vol. 357, issue 3, 593-612

Abstract: An important property of networked systems is their robustness against removal of network nodes, through either random node failure or targeted attack. Although design methods have been proposed for creating, ab initio, a network that has optimal robustness according to a given measure, one is often instead faced with an existing network that cannot feasibly be substantially modified or redesigned, yet whose robustness can be improved by a lesser degree of modification. We present empirical results that show how robustness, as measured either by the size of the largest connected component or by the shortest path length between pairs of nodes, is affected by several different strategies that alter the network by rewiring a fraction of the edges or by adding new edges. We find that a modest alteration of an initially ‘scale-free’ network can usefully improve robustness against attack, particularly when the fraction of attacked nodes is small, and we identify modification schemes that are most effective for this purpose.

Keywords: Complex networks; Scale-free networks; Robustness; Largest connected component (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437105003523
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:357:y:2005:i:3:p:593-612

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2005.03.040

Access Statistics for this article

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications is currently edited by K. A. Dawson, J. O. Indekeu, H.E. Stanley and C. Tsallis

More articles in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().