A loop enhancement strategy for network robustness

Abstract

Many real systems are extremely vulnerable against attacks, since they are scale-free networks as commonly existing topological structure in them. Thus, in order to improve the robustness of connectivity, several edge rewiring methods have been so far proposed by enhancing degree–degree correlations. In fact, onion-like structures with positive degree–degree correlations are optimally robust against attacks. On the other hand, recent studies suggest that the robustness and loops are strongly related to each other. Therefore, we focus on enhancing loops as a new approach for improving the robustness. In this work, we propose edge rewiring methods and evaluate the effect on the robustness by applying to real networks. Our proposed methods are two types of rewirings in preserving degrees or not for investigating the effect of the degree modification on the robustness. Numerical results show that our proposed methods improve the robustness to the level as same or more than the state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, our work shows that the following two points are more important for further improving the robustness. First, the robustness is strongly related to loops more than degree–degree correlations. Second, it significantly improves the robustness by reducing the gap between the maximum and minimum degrees.