VULNERABILITY OF EFFECTIVE ATTACK ON EDGES INSCALE-FREE NETWORKS DUE TO CASCADING FAILURES

摘要

Assume the initial load of an edge ij in a network to be L_(ij)= [(k_iΣ_(a∈Γ_i)k_a)(k_jΣ_(b∈Γ_j)k_b)]~αwith k_i, andk_jbeing the degrees of nodes connected by the edge,where αa is a tunable parameter which controls.the strength of edge initial load,and F and are the sets of neighboring nodes of i and j, respectively. We investigatethe cascading phenomenon of uncorrelated scale-free networks subject to two differentattacking strategies on edges, i.e. attacking on the edges with the highest loads or thelowest loads (LL). By the critical threshold of edge capacity quantifying the networkrobustness, we numerically discuss the effects of two attacks for the network vulnerability.Interestingly, it is found that the attack on the edge with the LL is highly effective indisrupting the structure of the attacked network when a < 0.5. In the case of a = 0.5,the effects of two attacks for the network robustness against cascading failures are almostidentical. We furthermore provide the theoretical prediction support for the numericalsimulations. These results may be very helpful for real-life networks to protect the keyedges selected effectively to avoid cascading-failure-induced disasters.