Self-healing networks: redundancy and structure

Abstract

We introduce the concept of self-healing in the field of complex networks. Obvious applications range from infrastructural to technological networks. By exploiting the presence of redundant links in recovering the connectivity of the system, we introduce self-healing capabilities through the application of distributed communication protocols granting the "smartness" of the system. We analyze the interplay between redundancies and smart reconfiguration protocols in improving the resilience of networked infrastructures to multiple failures; in particular, we measure the fraction of nodes still served for increasing levels of network damages. We study the effects of different connectivity patterns (planar square-grids, small-world, scale-free networks) on the healing performances. The study of small-world topologies shows us that the introduction of some long-range connections in the planar grids greatly enhances the resilience to multiple failures giving results comparable to the most resilient (but less realistic) scale-free structures.

References in corpus (4)

• Synchronization in complex networks
• Critical phenomena in complex networks
• Mitigation of Malicious Attacks on Networks
• Complex network analysis of water distribution systems

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Network resilience
• Models for the modern power grid
• Network science based quantification of resilience demonstrated on the Indian Railways Network
• Resilience of natural gas networks during conflicts, crises and disruptions
• Simple and efficient self-healing strategy for damaged complex networks
• The equal load-sharing model of cascade failures in power grids
• Bypass rewiring and robustness of complex networks
• Effective Self-Healing Networks against Attacks or Disasters in Resource Allocation Control
• Optimal counter-current exchange networks
• Persistent Threshold Dynamics with Recovery in Complex Networks