On local link repairing in complex communication networks under intentional attack

Recent researches reveal that some most important communication systems, including the Internet and the World-Wide Web (WWW), may be modeled as scale-free networks with power-law nodal-degree distributions. It is found that such networks are robust against random node/link failures yet fragile under intentional attack that takes down network nodes in a decreasing order of their degrees. Various strategies have been proposed to improve network robustness against such kind of attack. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a simple local link repairing strategy. The main idea is to restore some of the links that have been cut when a network node is crashed by rewiring each of them to another node. To simplify the implementations, we restrict the restoration operation to be strictly decentralized with only local information being available to each node. Simulation results show that the simple strategy can significantly enhance network robustness. More interestingly, among the several methods that have been tested, the simplest one with the minimum local information exchanges and limited backup resources appears to achieve the best performance. Such observations provide us some insights useful for the future developments of efficient repairing schemes under the intentional attack.