2008/11/20 by Ali Sydney, Sydney, Ali, Caterina Scoglio +5
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #Data Analysis #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Interconnection Networks and Systems #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) #Performance (cs.PF) #Software-Defined Networks and 5G #Statistics and Probability (physics.data-an)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0811.3272
openalex publication_date 2008/11/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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.