Error and attack vulnerability of temporal networks

The study of real-world communication systems via complex network models has greatly expanded our understanding on how information flows, even in completely decentralized architectures such as mobile wireless networks. Nonetheless, static network models cannot capture the time-varying aspects and, therefore, various temporal metrics have been introduced. In this paper, we investigate the robustness of time-varying networks under various failures and intelligent attacks. We adopt a methodology to evaluate the impact of such events on the network connectivity by employing temporal metrics in order to select and remove nodes based on how critical they are considered for the network. We also define the temporal robustness range, a new metric that quantifies the disruption caused by an attack strategy to a given temporal network. Our results show that in real-world networks, where some nodes are more dominant than others, temporal connectivity is significantly more affected by intelligent attacks than by random failures. Moreover, different intelligent attack strategies have a similar effect on the robustness: even small subsets of highly connected nodes act as a bottleneck in the temporal information flow, becoming critical weak points of the entire system. Additionally, the same nodes are the most important across a range of different importance metrics, expressing the correlation between highly connected nodes and those that trigger most of the changes in the optimal information spreading. Contrarily, we show that in randomly generated networks, where all the nodes have similar properties, random errors and intelligent attacks exhibit similar behavior. These conclusions may help us in design of more robust systems and fault-tolerant network architectures.TelecommunicationsElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc