Cascading failure in Watts–Strogatz small-world networks

Abstract

In this paper, we study the cascading failure in Watts–Strogatz small-world networks. We find that this network model has a heterogeneous betweenness distribution, although its degree distribution is homogeneous. Further study shows that this small-world network is robust to random attack but fragile to intentional attack, in the cascading failure scenario. With comparison to standard random graph and scale-free networks, our result indicates that the robust yet fragile property in the cascading failure scenario is mainly related to heterogeneous betweenness, rather than the network degree distribution. Thus, it suggests that we have to be very careful when we use terms such as homogeneous network and heterogeneous network, unless the distribution we refer to is specified.