Cascading failures in interdependent scale-free networks of different coupling preferences with the harmonic closeness

Abstract

The dependency link has an important role in the robustness of interdependent networks, which is assigned by the degree, the betweenness and random coupling in previous works. To enhance the robustness and overcome the limitation in existing methods, coupling preferences with the harmonic closeness are proposed, i.e., assortative coupling with the harmonic closeness (ACH) and disassortative coupling with the harmonic closeness (DCH). We investigate cascading failures on interdependent scale-free networks with different values of the average degree and the coupling strength under intentional attacks. We find that interdependent scale-free networks with DCH are more robust than the ones with ACH. Moreover, increasing the coupling strength leads to the more serious cascading failures. Another striking finding is that our method significantly reduces the impact of cascading failures compared with the methods concerning the degree and the betweenness in interdependent scale-free networks regardless of the average degree and the coupling strength. These findings may be useful for the construction of the dependency links in interdependent scale-free networks to resist the cascading propagation.