Designing robust scale-free networks under targeted link attack using local information

Abstract

We study the effects of deliberate attacks to important links in scale-free networks and propose simple strategies to mitigate the damage. While strategies that require global network information and heavy computation have been proposed, here we focus on heuristics that make use of local information only and are much easier to compute. Using model scale-free networks and under the constraint of an invariant degree distribution, we show by numerical simulation that our approach in the average allows to enhance the network robustness notably, as measured by the integrity of the largest connected component. Because it is fast, the approach is also applicable to real-world networks of which we give two typical examples. Overall, the results are equivalent to those obtained in more complex settings that require global network knowledge and are much more computer-intensive, an important point for large networks.