Building Damage-Resilient Dominating Sets in Complex Networks against Random and Targeted Attacks

TL;DR

This paper investigates the vulnerability of small, cost-efficient dominating sets in complex networks to random and targeted attacks, proposing new methods to enhance their resilience and analyzing their effectiveness on various network types.

Contribution

It introduces two novel methods for constructing flexible dominating sets that balance size and resilience against network attacks.

Findings

Flexible dominating sets improve network robustness.

Proposed methods outperform traditional approaches.

Effectiveness demonstrated on synthetic and real networks.

Abstract

We study the vulnerability of dominating sets against random and targeted node removals in complex networks. While small, cost-efficient dominating sets play a significant role in controllability and observability of these networks, a fixed and intact network structure is always implicitly assumed. We find that cost-efficiency of dominating sets optimized for small size alone comes at a price of being vulnerable to damage; domination in the remaining network can be severely disrupted, even if a small fraction of dominator nodes are lost. We develop two new methods for finding flexible dominating sets, allowing either adjustable overall resilience, or dominating set size, while maximizing the dominated fraction of the remaining network after the attack. We analyze the efficiency of each method on synthetic scale-free networks, as well as real complex networks.