Phys. Rev. Lett. 86, 3682–3685 (2001)Breakdown of the Internet under Intentional AttackReceived 17 October 2000; published in the issue dated 16 April 2001 We study the tolerance of random networks to intentional attack, whereby a fraction p of the most connected sites is removed. We focus on scale-free networks, having connectivity distribution P(k)∼k-α, and use percolation theory to study analytically and numerically the critical fraction pc needed for the disintegration of the network, as well as the size of the largest connected cluster. We find that even networks with α≤3, known to be resilient to random removal of sites, are sensitive to intentional attack. We also argue that, near criticality, the average distance between sites in the spanning (largest) cluster scales with its mass, M, as √M, rather than as logkM, as expected for random networks away from criticality. © 2001 The American Physical Society URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.86.3682
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevLett.86.3682
PACS:
89.20.Hh, 02.50.Cw, 64.60.Ak, 89.75.Hc
See AlsoComment: S. N. Dorogovtsev and J. F. Mendes, Comment on “Breakdown of the Internet under Intentional Attack”, Phys. Rev. Lett. 87, 219801 (2001). Reply: Reuven Cohen, Keren Erez, Daniel ben-Avraham, and Shlomo Havlin, Cohen, Erez, ben-Avraham, and Havlin Reply:, Phys. Rev. Lett. 87, 219802 (2001). |
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