Characterizing the Robustness of Complex Networks

With increasingly ambitious initiatives such as GENI and FIND that seek to design the future Internet, it becomes imperative to define the characteristics of robust topologies, and build future networks optimized for robustness. This paper investigates the characteristics of network topologies that...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2009-09
Main Authors: Ali, Sydney, Scoglio, Caterina, Youssef, Mina, Schumm, Phillip
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Computer simulation
Design optimization
Elasticity
Network topologies
Networks
Nodes
Redundancy
Robustness
Topology optimization
Upper bounds
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:With increasingly ambitious initiatives such as GENI and FIND that seek to design the future Internet, it becomes imperative to define the characteristics of robust topologies, and build future networks optimized for robustness. This paper investigates the characteristics of network topologies that maintain a high level of throughput in spite of multiple attacks. To this end, we select network topologies belonging to the main network models and some real world networks. We consider three types of attacks: removal of random nodes, high degree nodes, and high betweenness nodes. We use elasticity as our robustness measure and, through our analysis, illustrate that different topologies can have different degrees of robustness. In particular, elasticity can fall as low as 0.8% of the upper bound based on the attack employed. This result substantiates the need for optimized network topology design. Furthermore, we implement a tradeoff function that combines elasticity under the three attack strategies and considers the cost of the network. Our extensive simulations show that, for a given network density, regular and semi-regular topologies can have higher degrees of robustness than heterogeneous topologies, and that link redundancy is a sufficient but not necessary condition for robustness.
ISSN:2331-8422