Enhancing network resilience via self-healing

Abstract

A crucial feature in implementing the next generation of smart grids is how to introduce self-healing capabilities allowing to ensure a high quality of service to the users. We show how distributed communication protocols can enrich complex networks with self-healing capabilities; an obvious field of applications are infrastructural networks. In particular, we consider the case where the presence of redundant links allows to recover the connectivity of the system. We then introduce a theoretical framework to calculate the fraction of nodes still served for increasing levels of network damages. Such framework allows to analyse the interplay between redundancies and topology, a key point in improving the resilience of networked infrastructures to multiple failures.