Graph metrics for network robustness—a survey

Abstract

Research on the robustness of networks, and in particular the Internet, has gained critical importance in recent decades because more and more individuals, societies and firms rely on this global network infrastructure for communication, knowledge transfer, business processes and e-commerce. In particular, modeling the structure of the Internet has inspired several novel graph metrics for assessing important topological robustness features of large complex networks. This survey provides a comparative overview of these metrics, presents their strengths and limitations for analyzing the robustness of the Internet topology, and outlines a conceptual tool set in order to facilitate their future adoption by Internet research and practice but also other areas of network science.