The frequent occurrences of cascading failures in power grids have been receiving continuous attention in recent years. An urgent task for us is to understand the cascading failure vulnerability of power grids against various kinds of attacks. We con
sider a cost restrained hybrid attack problem in power grids, in which both nodes and links are targeted with a limited total attack cost. We propose an attack centrality metric for a component (node or link) based on the consequence and cost of the removal of the component. Depending on the width of cascading failures considered, the attack centrality can be a local or global attack centrality. With the attack centrality, we further provide a greedy hybrid attack, and an optimal hybrid attack with the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) framework. Simulation results on IEEE bus test data show that the optimal hybrid attack is more efficient than the greedy hybrid attack. Furthermore, we find counterintuitively that the local centrality based algorithms are better than the global centrality based ones when the cost constraint is considered in the attack problem.
In modern power grids, a local failure or attack can trigger catastrophic cascading failures, which make it challenging to assess the attack vulnerability of power grids. In this Brief, we define the $K$-link attack problem and study the attack vulne
rability of power grids under cascading failures. Particularly, we propose a link centrality measure based on both topological and electrical properties of power grids. According to this centrality, we propose a greedy attack algorithm and an optimal attack algorithm. Simulation results on standard IEEE bus test data show that the optimal attack is better than the greedy attack and the traditional PSO-based attack in fracturing power grids. Moreover, the greedy attack has smaller computational complexity than the optimal attack and the PSO-based attack with an adequate attack efficiency. Our work helps to understand the vulnerability of power grids and provides some clues for securing power grids.
Over the years, quantifying the similarity of nodes has been a hot topic in complex networks, yet little has been known about the distributions of node-similarity. In this paper, we consider a typical measure of node-similarity called the common neig
hbor based similarity (CNS). By means of the generating function, we propose a general framework for calculating the CNS distributions of node sets in various complex networks. In particular, we show that for the Erd{o}s-R{e}nyi (ER) random network, the CNS distribution of node sets of any particular size obeys the Poisson law. We also connect the node-similarity distribution to the link prediction problem. We found that the performance of link prediction depends solely on the CNS distributions of the connected and unconnected node pairs in the network. Furthermore, we derive theoretical solutions of two key evaluation metrics in link prediction: i) precision and ii) area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). We show that for any link prediction method, if the similarity distributions of the connected and unconnected node pairs are identical, the AUC will be $0.5$. The theoretical solutions are elegant alternatives of the traditional experimental evaluation methods with nevertheless much lower computational cost.
Complex bufferless networks such as on-chip networks and optical burst switching networks havent been paid enough attention in network science. In complex bufferless networks, the store and forward mechanism is not applicable, since the network nodes
are not allowed to buffer data packets. In this paper, we study the data transmission process in complex bufferless networks from the perspective of network science. Specifically, we use the Price model to generate the underlying network topological structures. We propose a delivery queue based deflection mechanism, which accompanies the efficient routing protocol, to transmit data packets in bufferless networks. We investigate the average deflection times, packets loss rate, average arrival time, and how the network topological structure and some other factors affect these transmission performances. Our work provides some clues for the architecture and routing design of bufferless networks.
Many real-world communication networks often have hybrid nature with both fixed nodes and moving modes, such as the mobile phone networks mainly composed of fixed base stations and mobile phones. In this paper, we discuss the information transmission
process on the hybrid networks with both fixed and mobile nodes. The fixed nodes (base stations) are connected as a spatial lattice on the plane forming the information-carrying backbone, while the mobile nodes (users), which are the sources and destinations of information packets, connect to their current nearest fixed nodes respectively to deliver and receive information packets. We observe the phase transition of traffic load in the hybrid network when the packet generation rate goes from below and then above a critical value, which measures the network capacity of packets delivery. We obtain the optimal speed of moving nodes leading to the maximum network capacity. We further improve the network capacity by rewiring the fixed nodes and by considering the current load of fixed nodes during packets transmission. Our purpose is to optimize the network capacity of hybrid networks from the perspective of network science, and provide some insights for the construction of future communication infrastructures.
Information entropy has been proved to be an effective tool to quantify the structural importance of complex networks. In the previous work (Xu et al, 2016 cite{xu2016}), we measure the contribution of a path in link prediction with information entro
py. In this paper, we further quantify the contribution of a path with both path entropy and path weight, and propose a weighted prediction index based on the contributions of paths, namely Weighted Path Entropy (WPE), to improve the prediction accuracy in weighted networks. Empirical experiments on six weighted real-world networks show that WPE achieves higher prediction accuracy than three typical weighted indices.
For many power-limited networks, such as wireless sensor networks and mobile ad hoc networks, maximizing the network lifetime is the first concern in the related designing and maintaining activities. We study the network lifetime from the perspective
of network science. In our dynamic network, nodes are assigned a fixed amount of energy initially and consume the energy in the delivery of packets. We divided the network traffic flow into four states: no, slow, fast, and absolute congestion states. We derive the network lifetime by considering the state of the traffic flow. We find that the network lifetime is generally opposite to traffic congestion in that the more congested traffic, the less network lifetime. We also find the impacts of factors such as packet generation rate, communication radius, node moving speed, etc., on network lifetime and traffic congestion.
In this paper, we study information transport in multiplex networks comprised of two coupled subnetworks. The upper subnetwork, called the logical layer, employs the shortest paths protocol to determine the logical paths for packets transmission, whi
le the lower subnetwork acts as the physical layer, in which packets are delivered by the biased random walk mechanism characterized with a parameter $alpha$. Through simulation, we obtain the optimal $alpha$ corresponding to the maximum network lifetime and the maximum number of the arrival packets. Assortative coupling is better than the random coupling and the disassortative coupling, since it achieves much better transmission performances. Generally, the more homogeneous the lower subnetwork, the better the transmission performances are, which is opposite for the upper subnetwork. Finally, we propose an attack centrality for nodes based on the topological information of both subnetworks, and further investigate the transmission performances under targeted attacks. Our work helps to understand the spreading and robustness issues of multiplex networks and provides some clues about the designing of more efficient and robust routing architectures in communication systems.
