Structural resilience of spatial networks with inter-links behaving as an external field

Many complex systems, such as communication networks, display a surprising degree of robustness: while key components regularly malfunction, local failures rarely lead to the loss of the global information-carrying ability of the network. The stability of these complex systems is often attributed to the redundant wiring of the functional web defined by the systems' components. In this paper we demonstrate that error tolerance is not shared by all redundant systems, but it is displayed only by a class of inhomogeneously wired networks, called scale-free networks. We find that scale-free networks, describing a number of systems, such as the World Wide Web, Internet, social networks or a cell, display an unexpected degree of robustness, the ability of their nodes to communicate being unaffected by even unrealistically high failure rates. However, error tolerance comes at a high price: these networks are extremely vulnerable to attacks, i.e. to the selection and removal of a few nodes that play the most important role in assuring the network's connectivity.

Many systems, ranging from engineering to medical to societal, can only be properly characterized by multiple interdependent networks whose normal functioning depends on one another. Failure of a fraction of nodes in one network may lead to a failure in another network. This in turn may cause further malfunction of additional nodes in the first network and so on. Such a cascade of failures, triggered by a failure of a small faction of nodes in only one network, may lead to the complete fragmentation of all networks. We introduce a model and an analytical framework for studying interdependent networks. We obtain interesting and surprising results that should significantly effect the design of robust real-world networks. For two interdependent Erdos-Renyi (ER) networks, we find that the critical average degree below which both networks collapse is =2.445, compared to =1 for a single ER network. Furthermore, while for a single network a broader degree distribution of the network nodes results in higher robustness to random failure, for interdependent networks, the broader the distribution is, the more vulnerable the networks become to random failure.