Perturbation: the Catastrophe Causer in Scale-Free Networks

Tao Zhou, Bing-Hong Wang

Published 2004-06-23, updated 2004-06-30Version 3

A new model about cascading occurrences caused by perturbation is established to search after the mechanism because of which catastrophes in networks occur. We investigate the avalanche dynamics of our model on 2-dimension Euclidean lattices and scale-free networks and find out the avalanche dynamic behaviors is very sensitive to the topological structure of networks. The experiments show that the catastrophes occur much more frequently in scale-free networks than in Euclidean lattices and the greatest catastrophe in scale-free networks is much more serious than that in Euclidean lattices. Further more, we have studied how to reduce the catastrophes' degree, and have schemed out an effective strategy, called targeted safeguard-strategy for scale-free networks.