A comparative analysis of network robustness against different link attacks

• Analyses of network link robustness maintaining the number of edges are conducted.
• Four types of networks are used as the initial networks.
• Measures for optimized networks starting from different initial ones are similar.
• Topologies of optimized networks may be different.
• Optimized networks obtained by one link attack may not robust against other ones.

Recently, the study of optimizing network robustness has attracted increasing attentions, and the constraint that every node’s degree cannot be changed is considered. Although this constraint maintains the node degree distribution consistently in order to reserve the structure of networks, it makes the network structure be lack of flexibility since many network structure always transform in the modern society. Given this consideration, in this paper, we analyze the robustness of networks through setting a new constraint; that is, only the number of edges should be unchanged. Then, we use the link-robustness index (RlRl) as the measure of the network robustness against either random failures or intentional attacks, and make a comparative analysis of network robustness against different types of link attacks. Moreover, we use four types of networks as initial networks, namely scale-free networks, random networks, regular networks, and small-world networks. The experimental results show that the values of robustness measures for the optimized networks starting from different initial networks are similar under different link attacks, but the network topologies may be different. That is to say, networks with different topologies may have similar robustness in terms of the robustness measures. We also find that the optimized networks obtained by one link attack may not robust against other link attacks, sometimes, even weaker than the original networks. Therefore, before building networks, it is better to study which type of link attacks may happen.