On Intentional Attacks and Protections in Complex Communication Networks

Abstract: Being motivated by recent developments in the theory of complex networks, we examine the robustness of communication networks under intentional attack that takes down network nodes in a decreasing order of their nodal degrees. In this paper, we study two different effects that have been largely missed in the existing results: (i) some communication networks, like Internet, are too large for anyone to have global information of their topologies, which makes the accurate intentional attack practically impossible; and (ii) most attacks in communication networks are propagated from one node to its neighborhood node(s), utilizing local network-topology information only. We show that incomplete global information has different impacts to the intentional attack in different circumstances, while local information-based attacks can be actually highly efficient. Such insights would be helpful for the future developments of efficient network attack/protection schemes.