Study and Improvement of Robustness of Overlay Networks

The heterogeneity present in the real-world networks like peer-to-peer networks make them particularly vulnerable to attacks as large-scale cascade may be triggered by disabling a set of key nodes. In addition to this vulnerability towards dynamic events, real world networks react quite strongly towards certain types of attacks which may adversely affect their static properties. This brings an obvious concern for the security and robustness of these systems. In this paper, we present empirical results that show how robustness of overlay networks, measured in terms of different parameters like size of largest connected component, number of components and diameter, can be improved by applying various edge modification schemes. We also consider the dynamic effect of node removal along with its static impact on the network.