Connectivity reliability analysis of different scale BA networks

Large scale networks, which are complex systems with huge number of nodes and links, are difficult to evaluate reliability with the existing theory of algorithms, simulation and test methods because of high complexity. In practice, a simplified version of network is always developed as the basis for the evaluation in order to greatly decrease the complexity of the analysis. Therefore, it is of great importance to search for the potential influences on reliability brought by the network simplification. BA network is a classic scale-free network model, which is best suitable to describe the network topology of many practical complex engineering networks. However, the effect on connectivity reliability of BA network brought by downsizing and reducing the number of nodes for simplification is still not clear. In this paper, a reliability simulation test is designed based on the network model built up to analyze the changing of network connectivity rate as the result of the physical failure of BA network nodes. Simulation results demonstrate the conclusion that the connectivity reliability of BA networks with different sizes shares some similarities, which can be regarded as the basis for network simplification in the scale-free network reliability analysis.