On the temporal evolution of backbone topological robustness

Abstract

As society progressively depends on large-scale telecommunications networks and their connectivity rapidly rises over time, it becomes of vital importance to study their topological features. On the backbone level uncertain disturbances of its constituent parts may affect a sizable proportion of the population, thus this can well explain the recent focus on evaluating backbone robustness metrics. Unlike previous empirical studies, which are limited to static snapshots of topologies, in this paper robustness algorithms are applied to networks over time. The temporal evolution of topological robustness is studied for a set of four real backbone networks by observing snapshots taken at regularly spaced points in time. It is found that only half of the fundamental robustness properties are changing over time with even fewer improving their values. The introduction of the time factor extends the robustness analysis and allows for deriving results on the network robustness dynamics.