Whether as telecommunications or power systems, networks are very important in everyday life. Maintaining these networks properly functional and connected, even under attacks or failures, is of special concern. This topic has been previously studied with a whole network robustness perspective,modeling networks as undirected graphs (such as roads or simply cables). This perspective measures the average behavior of the network after its last node has failed. In this article we propose two alternatives to well-known studies about the robustness of the backbone Internet: to use a supply network model and metrics for its representation (we called it the Go-Index), and to use robustness metrics that can be calculated while disconnections appear. Our research question is: if a smart adversary has a limited number of strikes to attack the Internet, how much will the damage be after each one in terms of network disconnection? Our findings suggest that in order to design robust networks it might be better to have a complete view of the robustness evolution of the network, from both the infrastructure and the users perspective.
Targeted attacks have been thoroughly studied to analyze network robustness. Holme tested node degree and betweenness centrality strategies using simultaneous and sequential attacks. On @cite_21 simultaneous attacks based on network centrality measures and random attacks were studied.
@cite_21
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With increasingly ambitious initiatives such as GENI and FIND that seek to design future internets, it becomes imperative to define the characteristics of robust topologies, and build future networks optimised for robustness. This paper investigates the characteristics of network topologies that maintain a high level of throughput in spite of multiple attacks. To this end, we select network topologies belonging to the main network models and some real world networks. We consider three types of attacks: removal of random nodes, high degree nodes, and high betweenness nodes. We use elasticity as our robustness measure and, through our analysis, illustrate different topologies that can have different degrees of robustness. In particular, elasticity can fall as low as 0.8 of the upper bound based on the attack employed. This result substantiates the need for optimised network topology design. Furthermore, we implement a trade-off function that combines elasticity under the three attack strategies and considers the cost of the network. Our extensive simulations show that, for a given network density, regular and semi-regular topologies can have higher degrees of robustness than heterogeneous topologies, and that link redundancy is a sufficient but not necessary condition for robustness.