Shell attack on interdependent networks

Abstract

The robustness of networks suffering site or link attacks is a topic of great interest because it is an important issue affecting many real-world networks. The robustness of complex networks under attack is dependent upon the structure of the underlying network and the nature of the attack. However, random attack and hub-targeted attack do not adequately describe many real-world scenarios in which complex networks suffer from localized damage. Nodes within each shell are classified into two categories, protected nodes and unprotected nodes, in this paper. And we propose a kind of attacking mode based on shell structure, which means that when some node (root node) is under attack and malfunction, unprotected nodes of all shells or partial shells within network also fail. And, we numerically and analytically study the system robustness under the attack by taking Erdos-Renyi (ER) network as a example. The results suggest that the robustness of the networks with dependence links relies not only on the number of the dependence links but also on average degree.