Structural Fault Tolerance of Scale-Free Networks

The fault tolerance of scale-free networks is examined in this paper. Through the simulation on the changes of the average path length and network fragmentation of the Barabasi-Albert model when faults happen, it can be observed that generic scale-free networks are quite robust to random failures, but are very vulnerable to targeted attacks at the same time. Therefore, an existing optimization strategy for the robustness of scale-free networks to failures and attacks is also introduced. The simulation similar with the above proved that the so-called (1, 0) network has potentially interconnectedness closer to that of a scale-free network and robustness to targeted attacks closer to that of an exponential network. Furthermore, its resistance to random failures is better than that of either of them.