How Does Node Resilience Effect on Complex Networks?

Resilience, the ability of the system to withstand disruption and return to a normal state quickly, is an important and challenging issue in complex networks since both internal failures and external disturbances are inevitable and they may cause complete collapse of network systems. Researchers have analyzed the resilient behavior of complex networks from different points of view. Usually, the resilience of complex networks is measured using network topology related parameters, such as node degree, node betweenness and network clustering coefficient. Using these resilience measures, the resilience of network topology can be evaluated. However, networks are used to transmit data or material, so we focus on the flow transmitted on the network in this paper. The resilience is measured based on the quantity of flow. Different from previous studies, this paper considers that both the system and its nodes have multiple states and have resilience behaviors. To analyze how the resilience of nodes effects on that of the system, both random and three types of intentional attacks are simulated on nodes of both random networks and scale-free networks, respectively. Simulation results show how the network resilience changes along with the number of disturbed nodes and the node attack intensity. The relationship between the resilience of nodes and network is also discussed.