Epidemic and cascading survivability of complex networks

Abstract

Our society nowadays is governed by complex networks, examples being the power grids, telecommunication networks, biological networks, and social networks. It has become of paramount importance to understand and characterize the dynamic events (e.g. failures) that might happen in these complex networks. For this reason, in this paper, we propose two measures to evaluate the vulnerability of complex networks in two different dynamic multiple failure scenarios: epidemic-like and cascading failures. Firstly, we present epidemic survivability (ES), a new network measure that describes the vulnerability of each node of a network under a specific epidemic intensity. Secondly, we propose cascading survivability (CS), which characterizes how potentially injurious a node is according to a cascading failure scenario. Then, we show that by using the distribution of values obtained from ES and CS it is possible to describe the vulnerability of a given network. We consider a set of 17 different complex networks to illustrate the suitability of our proposals. Lastly, results reveal that distinct types of complex networks might react differently under the same multiple failure scenario.