Robustness and decentralized search in complex networks

Studies on complex networks have been motivated by the desire to better understand various real-life systems. Such systems, including Internet, world-wide web (WWW), airline transportation systems, food web, protein-protein reactions, co-authorship, and terrorist activities etc., when formulated int...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Xiao, Shi
Other Authors: Xiao Gaoxi
Format: Thesis
Language:English
Published: 2010
Subjects:
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/10356/42368
Description
Summary:Studies on complex networks have been motivated by the desire to better understand various real-life systems. Such systems, including Internet, world-wide web (WWW), airline transportation systems, food web, protein-protein reactions, co-authorship, and terrorist activities etc., when formulated into network models, display some nontrivial common features. For example, they all have heavy-tailed nodal-degree distributions, or in other words, all can be formulated into scale-free networks. Extensive research efforts have been made to study the robustness of complex networks especially scale-free networks. One of the most important results is that while scale-free networks are strongly tolerant against random failures, they are fragile under intentional attack which crashes network nodes in a decreasing order of their nodal degrees.