On Intentional Attacks and Protections in Complex Communication Networks

Shi Xiao; Gaoxi Xiao

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arXiv · cs/0609077

On Intentional Attacks and Protections in Complex Communication Networks

Shi Xiao·Gaoxi Xiao

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Abstract

Being motivated by recent developments in the theory of complex networks, we examine the robustness of communication networks under intentional attack that takes down network nodes in a decreasing order of their nodal degrees. In this paper, we study two different effects that have been largely missed in the existing results: (i) some communication networks, like Internet, are too large for anyone to have global information of their topologies, which makes the accurate intentional attack practically impossible; and (ii) most attacks in communication networks are propagated from one node to its neighborhood node(s), utilizing local network-topology information only. We show that incomplete global information has different impacts to the intentional attack in different circumstances, while local information-based attacks can be actually highly efficient. Such insights would be helpful for the future developments of efficient network attack/protection schemes.

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BibTeX RIS

Shi Xiao, Gaoxi Xiao. 2006-09-13. On Intentional Attacks and Protections in Complex Communication Networks. https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0609077

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