Improve Network's Robustness Against Cascade with Rewiring

Abstract

Cascade failure is an interesting theme on the study of complex network and has attracted a lot of researchers. Examples of cascade failure include disease epidemics, traffic congestion, electrical power system blackouts, etc. The most common feature of cascade failures is that a local failure event results in a global failure on a larger scale. A lot of factors are considered as cascade failure reasons such as network interdependency or network topology. The classic literature on cascade failure includes two basic models: percolation cascade and capacity cascade. Studies in capacity cascade are found in some important domains such as power distribution systems. In these systems, if external shocks or excess loads at some nodes are propagated to other connected nodes due to failure, the domino effects often come with disastrous consequences. Thus, how to prevent this type of cascade is an important emerging issue. In this paper, we propose a mechanism of mitigating flow-based cascade failure. We provide rewiring methods in which network is able to self-organize in order to reduce the damage of cascade failure. Simulation results indicate that adaptive networking may dramatically improve network's robustness against cascade.