Mitigation of cascading failures on complex networks

Abstract

To prevent or mitigate the cascading propagation on complex networks more efficiently, taking into account some existing protections and measures in real-life networks, we introduce a new mitigation strategy. Applying the global removal and two attacking strategies, we demonstrate the efficiency of the mitigation method on improving the robustness level against cascading failures in Barabasi–Albert (BA) scale-free networks and in the Internet, as well as in the power grid of the western United States. We show that only making simple adjustments to the overload edges can dramatically enhance the robustness of diverse networks subject to the global removal and targeted attacks. We further compare the mitigation strategy in two attacks and observe to what extent the improvement of the robustness in two attacks depends on the parameters in our cascading model. In addition, by the times that an edge overloads in the cascading propagation, we discuss how to protect the edges with the different load. Our results are useful not only for improving significantly the robustness of complex networks but also for further studying on the control and defense of cascading failures.