When an initial failure of nodes occurs in interdependent networks, a cascade of failure between the networks occurs. Earlier studies focused on random initial failures. Here we study the robustness of interdependent networks under targeted attack on high or low degree nodes. We introduce a general technique and show that the targeted-attack problem in interdependent networks can be mapped to the random-attack problem in a transformed pair of interdependent networks. We find that when the highly connected nodes are protected and have lower probability to fail, in contrast to single scale free (SF) networks where the percolation threshold p c = 0, coupled SF networks are significantly more vulnerable with p c significantly larger than zero. The result implies that interdependent networks are difficult to defend by strategies such as protecting the high degree nodes that have been found useful to significantly improve robustness of single networks.
Huang et al. REF translated the targeted attacks into random attacks to study the robustness of interdependent networks.
Robustness of interdependent networks under targeted attack
ArXiv
ArXiv
Physics Computer Science Medicine