On Network Criticality in Wireless Networks

Network criticality is a graph-theoretic metric that quanti-fies network robustness, and that was originally designed to capture the effect of environmental changes in core networks. This paper investigates the application of network critical-ity in designing robust power allocation and flow assignment algorithms for wireless networks. Achieving robust behavior in wireless networks is a challenging task due to constant changes in channel conditions and the interference. We con-sider network criticality as a natural robustness metric, and propose approaches to preserve the useful convexity proper-ties of network criticality, while resolving issues related to the non-convexity of Shannon’s capacity. 1